Nikodemus Siivola wrote:
2009/10/5 Robert Goldman rpgoldman@sift.info:
- We might want to say "you might want to install ASDF yourself if you
want to get a particular version of ASDF."
Please don't say this, unless you also provide instructions that allow people installing their own ASDF's not break things like SBCL contrib modules.
"Why is SB-FOO broken?" is pretty frustrating when it turns out that they broke their own environment my installing another copy ASDF that messes with SBCL's assumptions about loading contrib modules.
Well, here's an example of why people might want to be loading their own:
Recently, we modified the default dependencies of the test-op, entirely reasonably, so that by default you need to do a load-op on a system before doing the test-op. Unfortunately, this means that system definitions written for new ASDF will not test-op properly on earlier versions of ASDF. [Worse, I don't believe we can even test asdf versions properly --- seems like earlier versions don't have the asdf:*asdf-version* variable defined.]
I'd be happy to update the manual to include instructions for people installing git or downloaded versions of ASDF onto SBCL. However, SBCL is not my primary CL implementation, and I am not competent on my own to do more than say "this might break contrib modules on SBCL." Would it be possible for someone (you?) to provide suitable instructions? If you do this, I will undertake to do the grunt work of getting those instructions into the ASDF manual.
Alternatively, is it possible to modify the portable ASDF distro so that out of the box it would be capable of not breaking contrib modules?
Best, r