[Openmcl-devel] errors with the 1.9 rc

[Faheem Mitha]

Hi Robert,

CC me, please, I can reply via gmane, but it's not ideal.

On Sat, 09 Feb 2013 14:57:19 -0600, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info> wrote:

> Please report this as an ASDF bug on launchpad.

Ok, will do.

> I *suspect* that what is happening is that ASDF believes it needs to
> reload itself, and finds the Debian version.

I think it is trying to upgrade or something. See my recent message
with the input from Stas.

> I could be wrong about this.

> At any rate, you should report it to ASDF, which has recently changed
> its behavior to consider the possibility that it itself needs update
> when it loads a dependent system.

Not a great idea, IMHO. Self upgrading systems... hmm. I don't
understand why this feature is necessary.

> This has caused me troubles, as well, and I worked with Faré to tidy
> some of them up.  He is very supportive of repairs, and getting a good
> version of ASDF into CCL would be A Good Thing.

Agreed.

> Is this another "common lisp controller" issue?  If so, it's been a
> steady stream of problems...  You can count on your lisp library's
> provider not using it, and not caring about fixing problems in its
> packaging...

Debian depreciated common-lisp-controller some time ago. Having said
that, a bunch of the CL Debian packages still depend on it, so I don't
know exactly what the current status is.  As far as I can tell, it
doesn't do anything, and I'm pretty sure this issue has nothing to do
with it. The Debian CL team is also not very active these days.

> BTW, I don't think you should worry about removing Debian ASDF; I don't
> know of a lisp implementation that doesn't ship with ASDF in it now.

Ok. I haven't really checked all the implementations. The problem here
is partly that Debian CL packages all depend on cl-asdf, so one cannot
remove cl-asdf without removing all Debian CL libraries. (Granted,
lots of people probably think that everyone should use Quicklisp and
nobody should used the Debian packages, but I quite like Debian
packages myself.) I think they should at most recommend it. This is
IMO fairly un-Debian-like behavior. In general, Debian is quite good
about letting users work around and customize the system.

                                                       Regards, Faheem