Thank you all for the reponses.

Just some answers in random order.

First of all a "data" directory may be a build time dependency; my use case is loading a bunch of files with "tables" and some code depends on these tables.  Or a "deployment" dependency, YMMV.

Second, yes: you can do the (dolist ... (load ...)) thingy, but the whole point of ASDF etc is to have a declarative (as possible) specification of your system/library/package.

As per Robert:

  1. Are you asking how to tell ASDF to slurp all the data files without listing them explicitly?
  2. What do you mean by "at once"? Do you mean pull them all in a single operation (e.g., by appending them all to a single file and then loading that file)? Or do you just mean "I would like to be able to write a single s-expression to load all these files"?
1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Perl is against my religion, unless it is Lingua::Romana::Perligata

It looks like the asdf/contrib/wild-modules.lisp mentioned by Faré goes in that direction.  I will give it a spin.

All the best

Marco


On Mon, Dec 1, 2025 at 8:51 AM Svante v. Erichsen <svante.v.erichsen@web.de> wrote:
Hi!

To be honest, a “data” directory doesn't sound like a build time dependency, but who knows.

Yours aye

Svante


Am 1. Dezember 2025 03:59:19 MEZ schrieb "Faré" <fahree@gmail.com>:
On Sun, Nov 30, 2025 at 12:52 PM Scott L. Burson <Scott@sympoiesis.com> wrote:

 Why use ASDF?  It's a 2-liner in CL:

 (dolist (f (directory ".../data/"))
   (load f))

This use of directory is not portable at all, unlike
uiop:directory-files (UIOP being part of ASDF).
Also, ASDF will load your files once and only once as needed, enforce
load dependency order both ways, and integrate with the rest of your
build and other related tools.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
“Faré's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently useful CL build
system is an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow non-portable
implementation of a fraction of ASDF much larger than what it takes to
just use ASDF.” [Including ASDF]


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