Re: Naive DEFSYSTEM replacement
"Yuri Davidovsky (as work at disclosure dot ie)" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.lisp.lispworks.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
> On 28 Jul 2025, at 02:52, Robert Goldman (as rpgoldman at sift dot net) <[email protected]> wrote: > > I should also mention that a LOT of the code in ASDF/UIOP is for portability. The CL spec, because it was written in a time when there was more variation in operating systems and file systems than there is today. So it is too weak to allow writing a system like ASDF in pure CL: it requires engaging with implementation-specific code to do anything much with the file system, and ASDF has to do A LOT with the file system. I was actually wondering about the environment specific pathways and why there is still much cruft related to it in CL (the same asdf, e.g.) although the common sense would suggest that it was mostly operating system specific, and not implementation specific. I understand that asdf started in the early 2000s (as per one of the previous emails) which is respectably old but I have a hunch that even at that date the main systems you would have to deal with would be windows, linux and macos (with the latter two being unix systems with similar pathname handling as that was the time when apple released darwin (which is based on FreeBSD, as I am aware)). Anything other from the list of three would be also very likely standard unix operating systems, so how much did asdf really have to deal with funky pathname formats? I would imagine nowadays you virtually won’t be getting anything outside of the list of three, or maybe also a BSD system, which is still a unix with standard pathname handling. As older systems were getting decommissioned, most likely the code (if it was still needed) was updated to deal with new pathname formats on the new system (just for sanity if anything), and if it wasn’t then it likely wasn’t needed altogether anymore and trying to package it the way it was written may be not worth the effort. Whoever owned the code should’ve updated the pathname handling themselves for the new OS, if only not to propagate the cruft further into the ecosystem. _______________________________________________ Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users [email protected] http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html