Evolving ASDF: More Cooperation, Less Coordination
Venue
Proceedings of the International Lisp Conference 2010
Publication Year
2010
Authors
François-René Rideau, Robert Goldman
BibTeX
Abstract
We present ASDF 2, the current state of the art in CL build systems. From a
technical standpoint, ASDF 2 improves upon ASDF by integrating previous common
extensions, making configuration easy, and fixing bugs. However the overriding
concern driving these changes was social rather than technical: ASDF plays a
central role in the CL community and we wanted to reduce the coordination costs
that it imposed upon CL programmers. We outline ASDF’s history and architecture,
explain the link between the social issues we faced and the software features we
added, and explore the technical challenges involved and lessons learned, notably
involving inplace code upgrade of ASDF itself, backward compatibility, portability,
testing and other coding best practices.
