: rpg
: dherring
: rpg
Do we have the system dependencies right yet?
Probably not. However, I don't see that as a regression, nor has it prevented ASDF from gaining dominance. Thus it can probably wait until after the ASDF 2 release. No?
You are half right.
You are right that the absence of system-dependencies didn't hurt ASDF 1.
But that's not the situation now. At this point system-dependencies are in ASDF 2. I'm arguing that if we don't have them right yet, we should rip them out.
The regression vis a vis ASDF 1 is introducing a new feature that we know to be broken, not being missing a feature.
James pointed out before that this was busted and I didn't realize it until I used it. So a tip of the "I told you so" hat to James.
In other words, Daniel, we are agreeing about the principle of the thing, but are not on the same page about the status of the ASDF 2 code base.
While I sympathize with the remarks by rpg, I still think this is not a blocker.
1- we mostly don't properly support versions anyway, and we claim that our system dependencies fix that particular issue. They fix a lot of other issues. Personally, I'd ditch the whole version thing, to be handled by some tool outside the base ASDF itself (say, dpkg).
2- in the future, we could support extracting versions from a file - supply a pathname or a sexp specifying what file to extract the version and how.
3- the system dependencies mechanism is already much better than what's in ASDF 1, and I think we should keep it. That said, I would yield to a strong opposition to it.
[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ] The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic. — H. L. Mencken