Re: Re: Making ASDF-Install ASDF-Installable

[email protected]
Newsgroups gmane.lisp.cclan.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
>>>>> "DB" == Daniel Barlow <[email protected]> writes:

    DB> On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 07:18:15PM +0100, Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
    >> It's not because it's upgradable that you have to upgrade it.
    >> But it's nice for installers to be self-upgradable.
    >> fink, and gentoo do this for example, and it works well and nice.

    DB> And CPAN does it too, which is nice when it works and almost insanely
    DB> stupid when it doesn't (e.g. when it decides to upgrade Perl as well)

    DB> asdf-install was originally intended to be small and as self-contained
    DB> as possible, so that it didn't need lots of external libraries
    DB> (because without something like, say, asdf-install, it's tedious to
    DB> install lots of external libraries).  If people are planning on
    DB> turning it into some all-singing all-dancing app which gets upgraded
    DB> regularly, they might want to think about arranging matters such that
    DB> asdf-install-mini is the bundled-with-cl-compiler variant which
    DB> contineus to be small and featureless, and asdf-install-maxi is the
    DB> actively-developed version with all the bells and whistles, which can
    DB> itself be asdf-installed.  Then at least if your upgrade of
    DB> asdf-install-maxi breaks then you can use the -mini version to get
    DB> yourself out of the hole without too much pain.  If you can think of
    DB> better names, that's a double win.

Granted that A-I was intended to be a small utility that wasn intended
to be stand-alone, but the recent flurry of patches indicates that a-i
hasn't reached stability yet.  If there are such big bugs, seems like
an auto-update facility would be nice.  Otherwise, we are saying
"asdf-install is only for people who are going to watch
planet.lisp.org regularly or who are going to use SBCL packages.  As
someone who uses Allegro, I'd prefer that we not go that way, and I
do think that providing an easy way to keep asdf-install patched would
be nice.  Pulling new tarballs from cliki doesn't seem like that for
me, but maybe others differ...

As an aside, I think that the analogy with the obvious cpan breakage
is a false analogy with a piece of software that seems almost
comically misdesigned.  Anyway, since asdf-install is portable over CL
implementations, I don't see how it would know to trash my Allegro
install in true CPAN fashion!

Best,
R


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