On 28 Nov 2024, at 19:10, Joseph Mingrone wrote:

That's a function binding, so no, it cannot. I think you could change the function definition of system-config-pathnames to change all ASDF configuration locations from /etc/ to /usr/local/etc/. I do not know enough about how FreeBSD works to know if this is OK for your use case. I'm afraid that I don't understand how XDG works, either: that was Faré's addition.

The API does not look to me to be able to set a special configuration directory for only a specific kind of configuration (such as only for output translations and not for source-finding).

I do not. Do you have a backtrace? I suspect the problem is the use of "**", but I'm not sure. The manual states that

DIRECTORY-DESIGNATOR :=
    NIL | ; As source: skip this entry. As destination: same as source
    T | ; as source matches anything, as destination
        ; maps pathname to itself.
    ABSOLUTE-COMPONENT-DESIGNATOR ; same as in the source-registry language

And going to the page for the source registry DSL:

     ABSOLUTE-COMPONENT-DESIGNATOR :=
         (ABSOLUTE-COMPONENT-DESIGNATOR RELATIVE-COMPONENT-DESIGNATOR ...) |
         STRING |
         ;; namestring (better be absolute or bust, directory assumed where
         ;; applicable).  In output-translations, directory is assumed and
         ;; **/*.*.* added if it's last.  On MCL, a MacOSX-style POSIX
         ;; namestring (for MacOS9 style, use #p"..."); Note that none of the
         ;; above applies to strings used in *central-registry*, which
         ;; doesn't use this DSL: they are processed as normal namestrings.
         ;; however, you can compute what you put in the *central-registry*
         ;; based on the results of say
         ;; (asdf::resolve-location "/Users/fare/cl/cl-foo/")
         PATHNAME |
         ;; pathname (better be an absolute path, or bust)
         ;; In output-translations, unless followed by relative components,
         ;; it better have appropriate wildcards, as in **/*.*.*
         :HOME | ; designates the user-homedir-pathname ~/
         :USER-CACHE | ; designates the default location for the user cache
         :HERE |
         ;; designates the location of the configuration file
         ;; (or *default-pathname-defaults*, if invoked interactively)
         :ROOT
         ;; magic, for output-translations source only: paths that are relative
         ;; to the root of the source host and device

Possibly you need a trailing *.*.*?

Also, as I look at this, do you want your new output translations to shadow old ones? In that case you should put :inherit-configuration last instead of first.

Honestly, I don't know. But when I look at the source for parse-output-translations-string, it looks like it's a string parser, and does not use read, in which case reader macros would not work.

But TBH I cannot see how the

How about starting up a lisp with process-output-translations and parse-output-translations-string traced and posting the results here. Note that this is one of the things I don't like about the way that ASDF uses configuration files: it's hard to load ASDF and configure it for debugging before it sees its configuration files. You could actually edit the ASDF source to inject the tracing (or format statements), of course. (I have been meaning to add some switch to startup so that one can debug its initialization, but have not had the time.)