On Fri, 2016-02-12 at 16:07 -0500, Faré wrote:
I'm OK with declaring DEFSYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON a failure, and load-system (or load-systems) the official way to go. But
1- This of course requires heads up, updating all users before retiring the feature, etc. From my experience, if you start seriously deprecating today and sending patches to all authors who use it in quicklisp, you can expect to be removing that part of the code in two years or so.
2- To make these dependencies work properly still requires modifying ASDF to add explicit plan nodes for loading ASD files, that will contain the systems loaded by load-system. The same trick will also automatically make the :defsystem-depends-on work, since it itself calls load-system.
3- Yes, defining things in the ASDF package is ugly, but extensions are few enough, and using a prefix is a good enough namespace management strategy. Not the most horrible thing that working with CL does to you.
Please don't. It's a net improvement compared to the previous situation. It's easy to simply name your class with a keyword :package/foo-file.