On 18 Jan 2021, at 17:37, Wilfredo Velazquez wrote:
To reiterate, I believe that the instructions in https://common-lisp.net/project/asdf/asdf/Upgrading-ASDF.html 'Upgrading ASDF' could use some clarification.
I am attempting to run a newer version of ASDF than that provided by my impl. The text I'm having issue with is:
If your implementation already provides ASDF 3 or later (and it should), but you want a more recent ASDF version than your implementation provides, then you just need to ensure the more recent ASDF is installed in a configured path, like any other system. We recommend you download an official tarball or checkout a release from git into ~/common-lisp/asdf/. Once the source code for ASDF is installed, you don’t need any extra step to load it beyond the usual (require "asdf"): ASDF 3 will automatically look whether an updated version of itself is available amongst the regularly configured systems, before it compiles anything else.
Personally I've never really been a fan of installing ASDF this way since a) it requires loading ASDF twice: the implementation built-in and then the upgrade and b) it requires that ~/common-lisp/ be on ASDF's search path (I mess around with CL_SOURCE_REGISTRY envvar quite a bit and frequently end up excluding ~/common-lisp/). I tend to replace the implementation's built-in version https://common-lisp.net/project/asdf/asdf.html#Replacing-your-implementation_0027s-ASDF. But do note, I have seen this method occasionally break and I fall back to the ~/common-lisp/asdf/ apprach when it does. But I'm pretty sure it works in the latest release on at least SBCL, ECL, and CCL.
As far as I can tell, if you put a directory tree into `~/common-lisp/`, ASDF will traverse it looking for system definitions, and there is nothing you can do to override this. I have come to dislike the `~/common-lisp/` solution for this reason.
That's not quite right. It could definitely be more friendly, but there are a few ways to better control it.
To completely prevent ~/common-lisp/ from being traversed you could put an :ignore-inherited-configuration directive somewhere in the CL_SOURCE_REGISTRY envvar or $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/common-lisp/source-registry.conf. But that approach also would prevent the files in $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/common-lisp/source-registry.conf.d from being parsed (as well as any system level config). It might be nice to allow an inheritance config directive to be specified in the configuration directory parsing if it isn't already (there's an implicit :inherit-configuration tacked on the end of the directory based config).
Another option is to drop a .cl-source-registry.cache file in ~/common-lisp/ or one of the sub directories. https://common-lisp.net/project/asdf/asdf.html#Caching-Results. ASDF will stop recursing if it finds that file and just use the info it contains.
-Eric