On Wed, 23 Sep 2009, Gary King wrote:
Would anyone mind ASDF coming with an additional default value of ~/.asdf/systems/?
That does seem like a reasonable default for *nix. Is there an analogous spot for Windows / cygwin? Can we use, e.g.,
(merge-pathnames (make-pathname :directory '(:relative ".asdf" "systems")) (user- homedir-pathname))
Yes, user-homedir-pathname gives a reasonable value for all the implementations I've tested on linux, mac, and windows.
Regarding Tobias's question, if CL/ASDF take off, I think people will want more than one default location. On a unix machine, they might be /usr/asdf, /usr/local/asdf, and ~/.asdf. On Windows, they might be C:\asdf, C:\Windows\asdf, and $HOME\asdf (I forget the exact $HOME variable name right now).
As Faré pointed out, these should be specified through a site-specific configuration rather than being hard-coded into ASDF. Such configuration might involve querying an environment variable or reading a config file from a known location (that's how most shells set these environment variables).
If reading config files, the two major conventions I know are - read the global config, then the user config, possibly overwriting settings - read the first available config file, trying the user config then the global config
Later, Daniel