On 4/8/12 Apr 8 -7:37 PM, Faré wrote:
On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 15:28, Nikodemus Siivola nikodemus@random-state.net wrote:
On 8 April 2012 17:36, Faré fahree@gmail.com wrote:
I think requiring a few marginal hackers doing weird things to specifiy :encoding :default is a small price to pay for everyone to be able to specify
I disagree. Consider this:
X has a system that used to be in, say, LATIN-9. He uses latin-9 at home, and everything works fine. His users either use it as well, or at least another single-byte encoding.
ASDF is updated, and X's user reports breakage. Everything works fine for X, because he didn't update ASDF yet. So he updates ASDF, and X updates his system to specify :LATIN-9 (or :DEFAULT, or whatever).
Now another of his users reports breakage, because /they/ didn't update ASDF yet -- and their ASDF doesn't support :ENCODING, so things break. They update ASDF, which in turn breaks another :LATIN-N system they were using.
The potential cost is non-trivial, and I really don't pretend to know eg. how many Japanese hackers user non-UTF-encodings in their source.
IMO encouraging people to add :encoding :utf-8 is much saner.
I agree that transition costs must be considered.
This is somewhat OT, since it's really about general transition costs, but should we add a continuable error to parse-defsystem for handling unrecognized options?
I like beating people over the head that this might not do what they want, but I don't like leaving them with no way to proceed.
Possibly even better to have a continuable error that /remembers/ a defsystem option as something to be ignored. Then we wouldn't /keep/ complaining about :encoding over and over --- one continuable error continue and you'd be done.
cheers, r