Re: Naive DEFSYSTEM replacement

Yep.  That is the crux of the problem.

Still exemplified by the variations of CL:PATHNAME-HOST and
CL:PATHNAME-DEVICE on different platforms and implementations.  And that's
just a start.

Cheers

MA




On Mon, Jul 28, 2025 at 9:23 AM Yuri Davidovsky (as work at disclosure dot
ie) <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> > 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.
>
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