On 12 Jan 2018, at 22:00, Dave Cooper wrote:
Hi (I'm not sure who is current lead maintainer, but hopefully the group will have some wisdom),
I'm still the lead maintainer for the nonce. I believe Faré would like to see a replacement who is able to give more time and energy to the task. For that matter, I would, too! But no one has stepped up yet.
First of all, Happy New Year and thank you to whomever is monitoring this list. Your efforts are highly appreciated.
Our build process for Gendl and GDL for the past several years has involved using monolithic-compile-bundle-op to make concatenated fasls, then loading these fasls into an empty image to create the final build.
We do depend on (and include) uiop, but not asdf, in our final build product.
In order to have uiop available separately for inclusion in the monolithic-compile-bundles, we have been putting a copy of the uiop/ directory (of the same version as the ASDF we're using) into quicklisp/local-projects/.
Some time between ASDF 3.2.0.1 and ASDF 3.3.1, the function check-not-old-asdf-system got modified to add "uiop" to the test (first line of the function). This results (in ASDF 3.3.1) in a same-version uiop not getting loaded at all into a monolithic-compile-bundle, even if the system of said monolithic-compile-bundle contains a dependency on uiop and uiop is available in quicklisp/local-projects/.
For this reason, out-of-the-box ASDF 3.3.1 was not working for our build process. I have "fixed" the problem temporarily by modifying my local asdf.lisp to remove the "uiop" from the test, i.e. I've replaced
(or (not (member name '("asdf" "uiop") :test 'equal)) ....
with
(or (not (member name '("asdf") :test 'equal)) ...
as the first line of the defun check-not-old-asdf-system.
Question: Is there a supported way to do what I'm trying to do, without modifying the ASDF source code? Intuitively, it seems to me that we should be able to include uiop in build products using monolithic-compile-bundle-op, without including asdf.
I am afraid I don't have much light to shine here. It seems to me that we have an issue here that comes from using ASDF for two different purposes. In the case of what I think of as "normal" ASDF usage, ASDF ensures that a currently running lisp image gets into a consistent state with respect to software systems, and can be kept in (or perhaps restored to) such a state as source code is modified.
The bundle operations do something that is substantially different. They are being used to *construct* a new and different Lisp image, I believe, and so comparing to the state of the running image may be wrong. This seems like such a case: the state of the ASDF system and UIOP in the *running* image doesn't necessarily correspond to the state of those systems in the image you are constructing. In that case, it seems to me that check-not-old-asdf-system may be simply inappropriate as a check in some (all?) bundle operations. But I would be hard pressed to say when it is and is not appropriate. E.g., presumably it is appropriate in image building, since any image one builds would include the current running ASDF. But that argument does not seem to hold for bundles full of fasls or source code, does it?
I wonder if it is possible that we should move this check out of its current location, where it attempts to hide out-of-date versions of ASDF and UIOP from view. Maybe we should instead make an installed version of ASDF visible to `locate-system` so that any out-of-date version will be shadowed that way, instead of needing to be hidden from `locate-system`, as it is now.
In one sense at least, Faré is right that I should be replaced as maintainer. I have never used any of the bundle operations, and feel ambivalent about their inclusion into ASDF. They crept in as a side-effect of supporting lisps that use the C compiler, but they are a *substantial* increase in the breadth and maintenance difficulty of ASDF. I'm afraid I have neither the time nor the interest to carry that burden. I would be happy to yield it to others.