Re: defsystem vs asdf

On Aug 16, 2005, at 3:57 PM, Sam Steingold wrote:

>> * Marco Antoniotti <[email protected]> [2005-08-16 15:34:09 -0400]:
>>
>> On Aug 16, 2005, at 3:30 PM, Paolo Amoroso wrote:
>>
>>> Sam Steingold <[email protected]> writes:
>>>
>>>> is it true that "defsystem is dead and everyone should switch to
>>>> asdf"?
>>>
>>> I don't know whether DEFSYSTEM is dead.  But I would use CLOCC
>>> subsystems much more if there was support for ASDF.
>>>
>>
>> But MK:DEFSYSTEM supports subsystems in a nicer way than ASDF.
>
> in what ways?

See my answer to Paolo.

>
>> So, the question is why don't you give it a spin.
>
> I would much rather have one de-facto standard SDF than two similar but
> incompatible ones.

Of course.  The right way to go ahead and do this is to write up a spec 
first and then to go ahead and re-implement.

> since ASDF was created _after_ DEFSYSTEM, apparently it addresses some
> problems with DEFSYSTEM (which ones?) and does not carry the same
> backwards compatibility baggage.

It surely does not carry the baggage, but it has one characteristics 
that makes it somewhat monolithic as well.  Essentially the dependency 
relationships are computed in one shot.   This is one thing that I 
personally don't like and that I think somewhat restrict extensibility 
(of course MK:DEFSYSTEM 3.5 does not allow that either).  One thing 
that MK:DEFSYSTEM has is that it still does a little more "out of the 
box" (at least for me) than ASDF.

BTW.  I think that KMP papers on "DEFSYSTEMS" is interesting but it 
falls too much short of describing what is really needed: i.e. 
dependency checking.  Moreover I deeply dislike the :in-order-to etc 
syntax and its (implied) semantics.  Mark Kantrowitz was very right in 
moving away from it.

All in all I have been debating myself whether to switch to ASDF.  
Somehow, I just haven't.  Plus, I have some semi-working code for 
MK:DEFSYSTEM 5.0 that I have been using locally, but I am not satisfied 
with that either and time is a tyrant.

Cheers
--
Marco



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Marco Antoniotti					http://bioinformatics.nyu.edu
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September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices
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