On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 2:38 AM, Mark Evenson <evenson@panix.com> wrote:

 On 21 Aug 2014, at 02:36, Faré <fahree@gmail.com> wrote:

 […]

 The trick here is in this new stop-at-asd flag, which here defaults to
 t and isn't configurable, but which should default to nil and be
 configurable, for backward compatibility. Its effect is that recursing
 into subdirectories stops if a .asd file is found in the toplevel
 directory. This saves a lot of recursing, and would save even more if
 a .asd file of symlink to one exists at the top of a git hierarchy.
 But this is incompatible with a lot of existing code, and so the
 transition will be long and pai
 nful if
this is adopted.

 If you proposing that the stop-at-asd property would be somehow configurable in
 the DEFSYSTEM form, like:

         (asdf:defsystem :foo
            :contains-interior-asdf-defintions
            :components …

 then please ensure that this is present when/if you introduce this change to
 ASDF.  But I get the feeling that in order to speed things up, you weren’t
 intending to parse the DEFSYSTEM form in your search.

Indeed, requiring to parse a .asd file is a bad idea — and is even
worse when there are hundreds of .asd files in the directory.

But maybe we could detect a file called source-registry.conf or
something similar, and parse that to look for subdirectories with .asd
files in them. In the absence of such a file, the default behavior
would for backward compatibility be to always recurse, or maybe for
speed in a future versi
 on
years from now be to recurse only if no .asd
file was found.

 If you are proposing that the user would have to do explicitly do some sort of
 configuration “for this instance of a user using asdf with this Lisp
 implementation”, I won’t be so happy because:

 1)  This sort of configuration hasn’t been necessary before, so we will
 introduce complexity in ASDF deployment for efficiency in using CL as a
 scripting language which is something I don’t currently use (Admittedly because
 my platform, ABCL, based on the JVM, is just not going to ever have reasonable
 startup times.  Although there are systems that keep a JVM “warmed up” for
 firing such one-off commands to, and for specialised JVM there are memory
 mapped solutions for faster startup).

 2)  I am using a system 
 (lsw2)
not in Quicklisp that has many such “interior”
 ASDF definitions. Usually when systems get in this state it is because they are
 big enough that nobody has time to package them correctly, so they tend to stay
 that way.  If I can’t put a flag in the top-level system, I’m going to run into
 problems when users haven’t done the per-user-per-lisp configuration.

What about supporting a source-registry.conf or .asdf-search.conf or
similar file to control recursion of the search, and eventually
requiring it when a directory both has a .asd file yet requires
recursion?

ASDF should do the right thing and require no configuration from
users, but minimal configuration of their own directory structures by
programmers is acceptable — except that for backward compatibility, it
should default to always recurse for now.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics
 • http://fare.tunes.org
The problem with Unix ever becoming a widely popular desktop operating system
is referred to as the 'guru in the box' problem. To get and keep Unix running
smoothly you need a captive guru on site and there just aren't enough gurus
to put in the shipping boxes.
        — Brian Kernighan

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