On 15 Jul 2019, at 18:27, Mark H. David wrote:

How do ASDF developers using emacs with SLIME deal with doing meta-dot (meta-.) on function names in ASDF sources. Out of the box, mostly when I meta-. just goes to one big top-level form that starts like this

(with-upgradability ()

(define-condition invalid-source-registry (invalid-configuration warning)

Thanks for clues,

-Mark

One answer to that is that I do the following before I start debugging, to avoid debugging the big concatenated ASDF file:

(defun debug-asdf ()
  (asdf:load-system :uiop :force t)
  (dolist (c (asdf::required-components :asdf/defsystem :keep-component
                                        'asdf:cl-source-file))
    (load (asdf:component-pathname c))))

However, that only gets us to the nearest with-upgradability macro invocation in the real source file, rather than in build/asdf.lisp.

I'm not sure how to answer your further question, because I think the answer might depend on the implementation you are using.

I think slime outsources to the implementation how to find a function definition, but I'm not an expert on SLIME internals.

Allegro's emacs lisp interface had a thing where it would ask the lisp environment which file held various definitions, and would then search for it based on some secret sauce involving excl::define-parser or something like that.

I'd have to know more about SLIME to give a better answer. Maybe someone else can chime in?