On 16 Jan 2018, at 10:46, Sam Steingold wrote:
Hi,
When I start CLISP with the full linking set (i.e., including all possible extensions), I have 63 packages in (list-all-packages), and 37 of them (more than half!) comes from asdf (22 ASDF/* and 15 UIOP/*).
I wonder if I am the only one unhappy about this. In particular, has it ever been considered that it might be a good idea to limit the number of packages asdf creates?
The large number of packages was the outcome of the restructuring of ASDF in terms of package inferred systems.
Arguably this provides a better way of automatically identifying the dependencies in a complex system like ASDF.
This is not a style of programming that I follow, myself, but it certainly seems like a reasonable design decision.
Undoing this would, I believe, be a monumental amount of work, and would also lead to a constant need to maintain complicated dependencies by hand. These dependencies potentially change whenever we discover that one file/package needs another's capabilities. With package-inferred system construction, we don't have to wrangle ASDF dependencies to keep the system building successfully.
To be quite honest, I can't imagine a world in which there is so much labor available to ASDF that such fundamentally aesthetic considerations would rise to the top of anyone's priority list of ASDF tasks.
Sorry, r