Re: Naive DEFSYSTEM replacement

On 28 Jul 2025, at 16:44, Robert Goldman (as rpgoldman at sift dot net) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> That may be true, but I argue that it's ASDF that really made it possible to share these libraries. I was active in these days myself, and it was really quite painful to install one of these libraries. It typically involved editing configuration files, often with a lot of fussy pathnames.

So was I.  And yes, it was.  Somewhere I probably have notebooks with instructions on what incantation you needed to get various things to run on various implementations.  It was not easy, and people have clearly just forgotten how much time used to be spent editing bits of source code to make things work (not just for Lisp).  ASDF (and Quicklisp) made this situation far, far better for CL.

And if you look at the sources for an earlyish PCL version you'll find

;;; Yet Another Sort Of General System Facility and friends.
;;;
;;; The entry points are defsystem and operate-on-system.  defsystem is used
;;; to define a new system and the files with their load/compile constraints.
;;; Operate-on-system is used to operate on a system defined that has been
;;; defined by defsystem.  For example:

It is, actually, kind of funny to see people complaining about how big ASDF is.  Have you ever looked at autoconf?

And the 'nobody knows what it all does' thing.  If you as a maintainer remove or incompatibly change anything then you lose if *anyone out there* relies on it, when you generally have no idea at all who is out there.  So you’ve gotta ask yourself one question: 'do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?

--tim

_______________________________________________
Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users
[email protected]
http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html