On 5/13/11 May 13 -3:56 PM, Ernst van Waning wrote:

Dear Fare, Robert,

I am moving this out of the ticket, because it's a general matter of ASDF discussion now, especially since this ticket is fixed....

[I /hope/ this reaches Ernst, but I actually do not have his email address, and I have no way of knowing if he's subscribed to asdf-devel...]

Thank you very much for your work. Version 2.15 is downloaded and I intend to use it.

Please regard what I write below in a positive way. To get up to speed with asdf2, I would like to read a tutorial. Is there one? If not, can I help write one?

As I have Allegro and SBCL now, I would like to get asdf to place and find the respective FASLs in directories for Allegro resp. SBCL. From the documentation (http://common-lisp.net/project/asdf/asdf.html#Controlling-where-ASDF-saves-c...) I see that this should be possible. After having read the entire document several times over the last few weeks, I still have no clear ideas about how to do this. With due respect, it feels like the documents I write about my own work :-) When I write about my own work, I am too deeply involved to write tutorials about it.

So, if there is a tutorial explaining how to start using asdf effectively, please point me to it; if not I am willing to help you write it. It is hard for me to imagine I am the only one having difficulties here.

If asdf is (to be) the de-facto standard for defining systems in CL, a tutorial will help the CL-community understand and use asdf and perhaps even use CL-software written by others. I might refer you to recent discussions on c.l.l. about curses of Lisp: imHo, Lisp is far from cursed, but needs more accessible documentation. If that is not there, then we will find tricks or roll our own, which is not desirable if we want to be a prosperous community.

I would be reluctant to see us spawn YA document. Instead, I would rather see the manual get fixed. I confess that I myself do not actually know how to do this: I am a longtime user of Gary King's ASDF-BINARY-LOCATIONS (as are my colleagues at work), and I have simply happily moved to

(asdf:enable-asdf-binary-locations-compatibility :centralize-lisp-binaries nil)

and all is well.

So I'm not the right person to write such a tutorial. That said, if you were to provide corrections/extensions to this part of the manual, or a stand-alone FAQ, I would be more than happy to fold that material into the manual.

Question: if you aren't fussy about /where/ the binaries go, isn't it enough to simply let ASDF start up, and it will keep your binaries apart, using the output-locations as configured out of the box? I am more used to people having the problem of needing to /disable/ these translations, or use a-b-l compatibility, than people having trouble with the built-in code.

best, r