(no subject)

I'm new to the cclan list, so I'm not sure how much folks discuss  
asdf issues here, but assuming this is the right place, bear with me  
while I set up the problem for a moment: So I'm trying to package up  
some C code to use as a test for gcc-xml-ffi. I have some C code that  
I'd like to use to generate a shared library, which will then be  
loaded by SBCL at runtime. To do this I can 1) hand-code the Makefile  
rules with the approrpriate platform-specific compiler/linker  
incantations to get the shared library, 2) use autotools, or 3) try  
to rig up some sort of asdf-based system to do this. I've done 1 for  
darwin and got 2 to work, but I wasn't super happy with distributing  
this giant mess of m4 files just to compile some shared libraries,  
so  I decided to explore 3. Actually, as I was considering this, I  
decided that I also wanted to use asdf to invoke gccxml to generate  
the xml for gcc-xml-ffi.

So far so good. SBCL has examples of how to do this in sb-posix (and  
somewhere else, IIRC this is a violation of OAOO, but let's put that  
aside for the moment.

But I've run into a couple issues:

* asdf perform methods specialize on operation and component, but not  
on the system. This means that if you define a method to compile C  
files for compile-op and c-source-file it will be applied to all c- 
source-files. This might not be desired. Clearly one can work around  
this by subclassing c-source-file, but that seems a bit silly. having  
a way to provide per-module or per-system operations seems like a  
good thing. Perhaps there is a way, but I'm missing on obviously good  
way to do this.

* cross-module dependencies. I'd like to declare multiple module with  
subcomponents like module foo with some c-header-files and c-source- 
files. Then I'd like for components in module bar to depend on, say,  
one of the c-header-files in module foo. I can't seem to figure out  
how to do this. The :depends-on arg as it currently exists seems 1)  
very lisp specific and 2) limited to dependencies within a particular  
component. I can't, for instance, say that a particular file depends  
on another system. I can only do system level dependencies for a  
system. Or at least I can't figure out how to do them. This isn't  
actually what I want to do, but I think it illustrates an example of  
the problem. In my case, what I want is for a source file in module  
bar to depend on a header file in module foo. This works as is in the  
sense that if a header file in module foo is changed, foo itself is  
recompiled, but in this case I want to trigger a recmopile of bar as  
well.

Clearly, asdf is an extensible system and through the right  
extensions I can make this work, but if anyone has any suggestions or  
comments on how to address these issues, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,

Cyrus



-------------------------------------------------------
SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO
September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices
Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA
Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf