On 6/24/16 Jun 24 -12:31 PM, rcn wrote:
Hi all,
Will wild-module support ever be fully and "officially" supported?
Currently there's what appears to be a sample implementation as part of asdf/contrib but, if I recall correctly, asdf/contrib is bound to disappear eventually (actually, the documentation says this is an empty package). However, it's not clear how to use it, it's not documented and it's not clear if it will ever be a part of asdf or not.
In my mind, this is an useful feature. Not for small systems (which, sadly, are the majority of Common Lisp open source projects), but for large systems where new files may be added to a directory to incorporate additional functionalities (a plug-in kind of thing).
In these scenarios, wild-module definitions would ease development and system maintenance greatly. As far as I know, asdf is perfectly capable of implementing it and it looks to me like an implementation-agnostic feature, so I see no reason not to include as a core component.
AFAICT, wild-modules are completely undocumented and, since I wasn't involved in their development, I don't understand what they are for, or what they are supposed to do. There are neither docstrings nor comments.
I also note that the code in contrib is more than 3 years old, so likely doesn't even work.
So I am not in a position to answer your question (except by saying "WTF is a wild module?").
In order to move towards integration, I would like to see some kind of specification to describe the intended function of WILD-MODULE, and how we intend to meet the specification.
Then we could move forward with getting the code integrated, and some appropriate documentation into the manual. A test suite would also be required before we could "ship" WILD-MODULEs.
Best, r