Gary King wrote:
I share Robert's queasiness and also think that we want ASDF to support these sorts of dependencies (simple, weak, contingent, etc... (?)).
I will do this.
I'm going to update the manual with James's table (thanks James!) in the hopes of giving us a place to hang our collective hats.
This is done.
That sounds like a good idea, modulo it would be great to put it in some new section like "TODO list" or "Missing bits in implementation."
How about pushing my documentation of weakly-depends-on at the same time? Possibly with some warning that the implementation of this may change.
Suggestion: instead of using a trick to get the square peg :weakly-depends on logic to sorta fit in the round-hole :depends-on slot, which forces us to (inappropriately, IMO) evaluate this stuff at macroexpansion time, I think we should suck it up and add extra slots for weak dependencies and contingent dependencies.
Follow-on suggestion: we need to think about what happens when a component has all possible combinations of :depends-on, :weakly-depends-on, and :contingent-on. Does something that would not be loaded because of :contingent-on avoid a crash that would come from a violated :depends-on?
Extra bonus follow-on: are these expected to be meaningful when the depended-on item is a system (clearly yes), a feature (seems handy), an arbitrary component (what would this mean?)?
Best, r
-- Gary Warren King, metabang.com Cell: (413) 559 8738 Fax: (206) 338-4052 gwkkwg on Skype * garethsan on AIM * gwking on twitter