On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 10:54 PM, Dave Cooper <david.cooper@genworks.com> wrote:
> Hi, I know this has been discussed, but what is currently the best practice
> for registering a preloaded system after loading Quicklisp?  That is, I have
> a pre-built image with some Quicklisp/ASDF systems in it, which were loaded
> through so-called monolithic-fasls (now known as compile-bundles). So the
> pre-built image doesn’t itself have ASDF or Quicklisp.
>
> A downstream user then loads Quicklisp and ASDF (I take steps to ensure that
> they are loading the matching version of ASDF and Quicklisp as was used to
> build the image).  Now I need to do something to tell Quicklisp and ASDF
> that certain systems are already loaded in this image, so it won’t try to
> re-load them as depended-upon systems. In this specific case, I don't want
> it to try to fetch and reload Gendl when the user does (ql:quickload ...) on
> an application which :depends-on :gendl (because gendl is already built into
> this image).
>
> asdf/find-system:register-preloaded-system seems like it should be the
> answer if we’re talking about plain ASDF, because it will prevent ASDF from
> raising a “missing-component” error for the system in question, if some
> other system :depends-on it and yet no source code is found.  But in my case
> I can’t guarantee that “no source code is found.” The source might be there
> in the quicklisp dist directory. So apparently I need something stronger
> than register-preloaded-system? Or something else?
>

Using asdf 3.1, you can use *immutable-systems* for that (see its docstring).

There is currently no provision to do it as part of a program-op, so
you may have to do it manually between a load-op and a program-op, or
as part of an image-dump-hook or image-restore-hook, contingent on a
variable that gets reset (the image-dump-hook doesn't work on ECL, and
you must use the ECL-specific epilogue instead; the image-dump-hook
wastes a little bit of time at restart on other platforms).

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