I tend to agree with Henrik for my own part. Despite the maturity of
some of the lisp libraries, I have found myself needing to patch or
tweak many of them at one point or another. Moreoever, if you asdf-
install a version, find a problem, report it, then you can't receive
a fix until another asdf-install version is released.
Our release cycle, at least, is quite long. It is very inconvenient
then to post patches that have to be manually applied.
I just took a peek at Mercurial - it's basically Darcs written in
Python although with some C extensions. Not sure I like adding yet
another source control to the Lisp ecosystem (CVS, SVN, Darcs, etc).
An ideal solution would be cl-darcs, but it's not quite mature enough
yet nor are there people other than the author using/supporting it.
I'm tempted to just use SVN for the next while, until there is a
proper cross-platform, distributed source control available (perhaps
when Darcs works better on Windows).
Ian
On Mar 29, 2007, at 11:32 PM, Henrik Hjelte wrote:
On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 22:46 -0400, Ian Eslick wrote:
The problem is asdf-install invoking a default behavior that does the
wrong thing with elephant. I guess no one has tried to load elephant
0.6.0 via asdf-install before.
And actually it really doesn't make much sense to bother loading the
asdf file after the install since it won't work until you've read
INSTALL and properly setup the external dependencies...sigh.
The problem is that asdf-install symlinks and loads all .asd files in
the root directory after the install. Since we use subsidiary .asd
files, this behavior doesn't work out very well.
I think in the next release we could fix this by merging all the .asd
files into one big one, but then I think you can't call load-op on
ele-bdb, ele-clsql or ele-acache, etc. Does anyone know off the top
of their head how CL-SQL manages this? I can look into it later if
no one knows the answer without looking into it.
Anyway, I'm open for suggestions.
I have a suggestion: drop asdf-install. Since elephant will need
tweaking, installing berkley DB or configuring a database, asdf-
install
will not work out of the box for years.
Instead moving to a distributed version control system is the way
to go,
combined with a stable branch and tagging for versions. That way it is
much easier to get people to collaborate on the project. And maybe
zipfiles/tarballs, but not asdf-install.
I personally think asdf-install as it is now is not a great idea. I
seldom use it anymore. If you use a library there is a big chance you
may want to tweak it some day, and then you are better of with a
distributed version control system. Some patches you might want to
send
in, some are best kept as your own changes. And asdf-installable
libraries don't have the _darcs folder included, so it make things
more
difficult.
Just my two cents,
Henrik Hjelte
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