Gary King wrote:
I share Robert's queasiness and also think that we want ASDF to support these sorts of dependencies (simple, weak, contingent, etc... (?)).
I'm going to update the manual with James's table (thanks James!) in the hopes of giving us a place to hang our collective hats.
That sounds like a good idea, modulo it would be great to put it in some new section like "TODO list" or "Missing bits in implementation." How about pushing my documentation of weakly-depends-on at the same time? Possibly with some warning that the implementation of this may change. Suggestion: instead of using a trick to get the square peg :weakly-depends on logic to sorta fit in the round-hole :depends-on slot, which forces us to (inappropriately, IMO) evaluate this stuff at macroexpansion time, I think we should suck it up and add extra slots for weak dependencies and contingent dependencies. Follow-on suggestion: we need to think about what happens when a component has all possible combinations of :depends-on, :weakly-depends-on, and :contingent-on. Does something that would not be loaded because of :contingent-on avoid a crash that would come from a violated :depends-on? Extra bonus follow-on: are these expected to be meaningful when the depended-on item is a system (clearly yes), a feature (seems handy), an arbitrary component (what would this mean?)? Best, r