I just felt like fixing this in ASDF would be better than requiring the caller to do it.
You could do that in the common case, I suppose, but the user would still have to call resolve-dependency-spec in the general case, since the protocol is extensible. Making it appear like the name has been resolved when it hasn't been is probably a lure that will invite people to do the wrong thing and get bitten — more efforts for negative return on investment.
Hmmmm.... The thing I don't like is to have some large number of half-baked bits of code that all do some buggy bit of tree recursion to make sure that they recognize that
:depends-on (foo) ; foo in some package :depends-on ("foo") ; string :depends-on (:foo)
are all the same thing. Failing to do that for the caller seems like we are providing a bad API.
I figured since "foo" is the internal form, (list "foo") should be the return for all three of the above cases.
If you call resolve-dependency-spec on
:weakly-depends-on (:blort)
when blort isn't present, don't we get a bad result that foils the intent of using system-weakly-depends-on as an introspection tool?
The user should use the same API as parse-component-form. And that's where I see that the way it filters weakly-depends-on is buggy, since it calls find-system and not resolve-dependency-spec. At this point, either it should call it and somehow catch a condition when the component is missing (but what if it's an indirect component while loading a .asd that raises the condition? This sucks — and locate-system won't suffice either for secondary systems), or you're right and we should restrict weakly-depends-on to system names and not generalized specs. In any case, ASDF is currently buggy.
I admit I never liked weakly-depends-on and never gave it much love. My opinion is that's it's an ill-conceived feature that I would never have let in because it doesn't fit my idea of a deterministic build (unless ASDF started to do filesystem versioning and include a hash of the used portion of the filesystem into the name of output files, like I never got around to having XCVB do). In any case, I never got around to either adopting the feature seriously, or seriously deprecating it and expunging it from the CL code base.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org — Question authority! — Yeah, says who?