Attila Lendvai wrote:

...

short-horizon alternative (besides using the revision control systems, which doesn't work terribly well when there are cross-library dependencies). If I

fwiw, in my experience this is right the opposite.

i don't say that i never have problems putting together a working setup, because inter-library dependencies can cause headaches with non-backward compatible changes, but in such situations i find DVCS'es especially useful.

Actually, I think perhaps the biggest part of the problem is that the :version :depends-on (and indeed, the :version attribute itself) in ASDF has never really caught on, meaning that as a library or system user it's hard to detect when a dependency has failed. Ideally, with a :version depends-on, it should be possible to detect when, e.g., my beirc update requires a version of cl-irc I don't have.... Doubly ideally, ASDF-install should support installing particular version numbers, and ASDF should permit us to have multiple versions of a single library installed.... But if people don't use the :version attributes, there's not really a lot of point in fussing about handling versions. I suppose it would be possible to back-end ASDF-install to a DVCS or a conventional VCS... cheers, r