Why asdf has no support for building in a separate directory#

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 23:03:08 +0000

Why asdf has no support for building in a separate directory.

It's a fairly common question. People - quite legitimately - want to leave their source directories uncluttered and put the fasls somewhere else. Perhaps that somewhere is different per-implementation, too, so that they can test the same source tree with different lisps.

So the answer is: because I'm lazy - so lazy that I not only haven't implemented the feature myself, but have failed even to merge patches when people send them to me. No, but wait, there's a little more to it than that.

There are two points: one's important and the other isn't, really. Let's get the less interesting one out of the way first.

it goes like this: asdf is supposedly a general system that can describe arbitrary operations, so why is compile-op such a special case that it gets its own special option to say where its output files go? Perhaps we should add similar options for make-manual-op as well, to say where the dvi and postscript files go. (Please note: I just made up the name of that operation: if you believe it exists anywhere in general usage, that just goes to show that it's plausible).

This is not such a convincing argument, because even if asdf were as much as 419% more general than it already is, most of what people would actually use it for would still be compiling Lisp systems, so there's a pretty good argument we should cater to the usual case.

Our backup argument is stronger, and it's this: most of the asdf systems you're using are for other people's software. (This is already true for me; if isn't yet for you, our efforts to take over the world with free common lisp just haven't impacted on you yet. Please take a ticket and await the revolution). Once you start editing files that are part of other people's software, you will run into conflicts: you'll have to eyeball changes to merge them when the author introduces new files or otherwise changes his copy of the file.

So, for each possible customization we could add, the question is this: who needs to make this decision? If it's something the system author should expect to change (e.g. the files that comprise the system, or the dependencies between them) then let's add a defsystem option. If it's something that the user or the local site admin (or even the distro maintainer) wants to do, then it needs to be achievable without editing the asd file.

Winding up, then: it is my contention that separate-directories-for-fasls are a per-user thing, not a per-system thing. If you want your foobar system to use separate directories for CLISP and ACL, you will probbaly want the split-sequence, cl-ppcre, mel-base, memoize, diff and s-xml systems it depends on to do likewise. And you want them to do so without having to edit all of their system files by hand.

It sounds plausible, anyway. But you can continue to claim it's laziness if that makes you feel better.