Dear Juanjo,

my apologies for breaking program-op on ECL for programs that didn't explicit depends-on asdf, asdf-driver or uiop, which used to work earlier, back when asdf-bundle's program-op used to be an ECL-only feature.

This regression was introduced somewhere in the 2.26.x rewrite, and is hopefully fixed in asdf 2.33.10. Please test. This is a somewhat more elaborate version of your patch, possibly overengineered: if not for initialization functions causing the whole shebang to be pulled in, it might have been enough to insert the sys:asdf.lib at the *end* of the link.

The reason is that all those executables (stupidly in my opinion) have dependencies on libraries that should now be linked with the program. In particular, ASDF itself, UIOP, etc.

Why is this so? Why do I have to link 800 [Kb] of library (ASDF and all its components) with every executable instead of abstracting a simpler load process where ASDF is not there unless, of course, a dependency on it is declared?

While it isn't impossible to make that work, that would have made it singularly more difficult to achieve, all the more in a portable way, especially so while preserving all the image life-cycle features: *image-restore-hook* *image-prelude* *image-entry-point* *image-postlude* *image-dump-hook*

It was hell enough to implement and debug this program-op feature so it will work portably on all of eight implementations (untested on mkcl), and what more support these features. I admit that saving 800kb on a minority of programs for which that matters was never a priority.

But now that it's working, ASDF could be made to work better with respect to program-op actually requiring uiop or not: 1- hooks could be provided to explicitly enable or disable such dependendency for program-op, and let the asdf and/or the user either bypass uiop or provide a "lite" replacement. 2- more useful error messages could be provided when the configuration is unusable. 3- the detection of whether uiop or asdf is actually needed could be more clever

I am probably not going to write any such feature, as I'm stepping away from ASDF maintainership, but I (and/or my successor) will accept patches.

Thanks a lot for finding the bug before I released 3.0.0. Sometimes, procrastination works.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org Comparing oneself with Galileo or Einstein is certainly good for the ego — provided one refrains from going into too much detail. — John McCarthy

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 10:37 PM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll < juanjose.garciaripoll@gmail.com> wrote:

link 800 Mb of library

Sorry, 800kb (0.8 Mb nonetheless, apart from the time it takes to bootstrap ASDF in ECL).