On 2/29/16 Feb 29 -1:37 PM, Attila Lendvai wrote:
3- It fails badly when asdf itself is so broken that it can't load asdf-tools. I only very recently (January 2016) modified the lisp scripting infrastructure to build an executable ./build/asdf-tools the first time they are called, hopefully with a stable working asdf.
isn't this a standard bootstrapping issue?
and the usual way to resolve that is to use git to check out the latest stable version into a tmp dir, build the tool, and then use the freshly built tool to test the bleeding edge.
for reference gambit scheme has a sophisticated method set up for adding new features that are then used in the compiler implementation in version n+1.
This isn't really a standard bootstrapping issue, and I think it's better to break the vicious cycle by simply booting the scripting engine out into a separate repository.
Here's the (I believe simple) approach:
1. Set up a repository that provides a *general* CL-scripting capability.
2. Build that capability using only stable tools.
3. Provide in the ASDF repository code that simply uses the CL-scripting capability. I.e., just provide CL scripts there, and not the scripting engine.
At this point we would have broken the vicious cycle, and the CL scripting engine would play a role akin to perl, make, etc., in the ASDF development process.
Instead, right now we have things like ASDF requiring to test that it successfully be able to build a tool suite using a new ASDF capability.
Note that this is what I'm suggesting *in the abstract*. Right now, the CL scripting framework is not, IMO, ready for prime time. I'm not willing to wrestle with undocumented, untested code as a precondition for simply fixing ASDF bugs.
I'm not saying that it's bad that CL scripting is at a primitive state now -- that's a state all software has to go through. All I'm saying is that CL scripting has a lot of promise, but it's not the kind of tested tool I require for ASDF development, and it's not going to get there (IMO) for some years yet.
So I am backing slowly away from it....