[Daniel Barlow <[email protected]>] [Daniel Barlow <[email protected]>] Re: Re: [Portableaserve-discuss] ASDF system for portable allegroserve on CMUCL

[ week-old mail that got bounced by the smtp filter at LSM.  Sorry ]

I replied on this subject (at more length than I'm about to write
here) yesterday morning, but my laptop crashed before I could get
internet access to send it :-(

David Lichteblau <[email protected]> writes:

> Are compilers obliged to signal an error if there are errors in the
> sources?  

No.  According to 3.2.5, COMPILE-FILE may or may not catch errors
signalled during the compilation process.  And for your real-life
example, CMUCL does, SBCL doesn't.

There are a couple of points worth making in connection with asdf.
Neither solves your problem, but either may at least ameliorate it
slightly.

1) you can set ``:on-failure :warn'' on individual components, instead
   of having to use the same *compile-file-failure-behaviour* across
   the whole system.  This will work with CMUCL because it stops on
   compile errors anyway.  It doesn't help with SBCL

2) for interactive development, the (badly named, I now realise)
   SKIP-COMPONENT restart can be used to carry on after an error that
   the user knows was not important.

For a proper fix there are three things I'd like to look at

a) COMPILE-FILE returns NIL if "if the file could not be created".
Do implementors interpret this as "compilation went so badly wrong
that it was not worth creating a file" (which would be nice) or is
this just for the cases where the fielsystem permissions were wrong,
or the disk was full, or suchlike?

b) if the COMPILE-FILE return value is not helpful, I guess I need to
wrap the compile-file operation in something that tests the dates of
input vs output files to determine if the compilation succeeded.  This
would be slightly sucky, frankly: given that the modification times
have only a one second resolution, given small files and fast machines
it's not actually guaranteed to work

c) It may be worth handler-casing around compile-file anyway, for
those impementations that do signal errors from it


-dan

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