On 4/29/10 Apr 29 -3:59 PM, Faré wrote:
: rpg
: dherring
: rpg
Do we have the system dependencies right yet?
Probably not. However, I don't see that as a regression, nor has it prevented ASDF from gaining dominance. Thus it can probably wait until after the ASDF 2 release. No?
You are half right.
You are right that the absence of system-dependencies didn't hurt ASDF 1.
But that's not the situation now. At this point system-dependencies are in ASDF 2. I'm arguing that if we don't have them right yet, we should rip them out.
The regression vis a vis ASDF 1 is introducing a new feature that we know to be broken, not being missing a feature.
James pointed out before that this was busted and I didn't realize it until I used it. So a tip of the "I told you so" hat to James.
In other words, Daniel, we are agreeing about the principle of the thing, but are not on the same page about the status of the ASDF 2 code base.
While I sympathize with the remarks by rpg, I still think this is not a blocker.
It's not a blocker to not have good system-dependencies, as Daniel says. But given that, I think the blocker is that we should rip out the system-dependencies misfeature. It's not right yet, so we shouldn't ship it, and encourage people to use it.
I.e., missing new features == not a blocker. busted new features == blocker.
ASDF is already hobbled by too many things that are almost right and that we have to maintain backwards compatibility for. Please let us not install another one...
1- we mostly don't properly support versions anyway, and we claim that our system dependencies fix that particular issue. They fix a lot of other issues. Personally, I'd ditch the whole version thing, to be handled by some tool outside the base ASDF itself (say, dpkg).
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Versions are CRITICAL. Even in the half-baked implementation we have, they are HUGELY valuable for developers.
They could avert vast quantities of pain using ASDF-INSTALL, if people actually USED them.
dpkg would be totally useless for people working from source code repositories.
I promise you, if you took versions out, I would go back to logical pathnames and load-paths.
2- in the future, we could support extracting versions from a file - supply a pathname or a sexp specifying what file to extract the version and how.
3- the system dependencies mechanism is already much better than what's in ASDF 1, and I think we should keep it. That said, I would yield to a strong opposition to it.
I think James' objections are right -- it doesn't correctly interact with packaging, etc. Let's hold off until we get it right. Especially since it introduces a new double-processing of the defsystem form. If we decide later on that this is a mistake, it will be really hard to do away with it.
best,
r