Faré wrote:
*This is partly my fault, but the current disarray of cl.net, the library's position as part of an abortive EDITOR-HINTS master system, and the previous maintainer's putting it into a revision control system (darcs) that I don't use and don't understand are additional contributing factors.
If you're the new maintainer, I suggest converting the darcs repository to git and maybe putting the library on github.
I don't know enough to translate a darcs repo to git. I could probably manage this, but tcr buried the NAMED-READTABLES repo somehow inside an EDITOR-HINTS repo, and linked the two in some way I don't understand.
This problem is compounded by the fact that when I tried to figure out how to fix it, the email on cl.net was broken so that admin requests went into the bit-bucket.
There are pending patches I need to push into NAMED-READTABLES, but I would need some assistance to fix this.
I note that NAMED-READTABLES are necessary to support your proposed changes, but *are not sufficient*, since support for named readtables would have to be added to the development environments.
I would like to forestall facile answers to the above claim, too. I don't just mean "SLIME would have to handle IN-READTABLE." SLIME would have to be fixed, yes, but also ELI, Allegro Composer, Hemlock (or whatever the CCL IDE is), LispWorks whatchamacallit, etc., etc.
ASDF should not demand a programming style that doesn't have full support for in-editor dynamic code writing and maintenance.
Yes, this means that there can be bad libraries out there, but there are lots of crappy libraries even aside from misusing readtables or pretty-print dispatch, and ASDF cannot fix them all.