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Common Lisp ASDF maintainer considers resignation

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Re: Common Lisp ASDF maintainer considers resignation

#4
post #3

For (way) more context see https://gist.github.com/phoe/7d24bdb1f2be76a02fecba8cfecbef3...

TLDR;

"Dev: Oh, you must have been using undocumented behavior of ASDF. Your code will continue to work as before, but if you change this #\- to a #\/ it'll stop complaining. User: Our code used to work in ASDF-stable. Any warning at all breaks our build, so it's broken in ASDF-devel. Just make it work like it did in ASDF-stable again. ... User: That undocumented behavior works well for us, though. Dev: That behavior that is a burden for us as ASDF maintainers, and we want to clean up our code and stop supporting it altogether."

Re: Common Lisp ASDF maintainer considers resignation

#6
post #4
post #3

For (way) more context see https://gist.github.com/phoe/7d24bdb1f2be76a02fecba8cfecbef3...

TLDR; "Dev: Oh, you must have been using undocumented behavior of ASDF. Your code will continue to work as before, but if you change this #\- to a #\/ it'll stop complaining. User: Our code used to work in ASDF-stable. Any warning at all breaks our build, so it's broken in ASDF-devel. Just make it work like it did in ASDF-stable again. ... User: That undocumented behavior works well for us, though. Dev: That behavior…

Another TLDR would be;

ASDF-stable is good enough that there isn't an incentive to update to a version of ASDF-devel that breaks backward compatibility.

Re: Common Lisp ASDF maintainer considers resignation

#7
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR; "Dev: Oh, you must have been using undocumented behavior of ASDF. Your code will continue to work as before, but if you change this #\- to a #\/ it'll stop complaining. User: Our code used to work in ASDF-stable. Any warning at all breaks our build, so it's broken in ASDF-devel. Just make it work like it did in ASDF-stable again. ... User: That undocumented behavior works well for us, though. Dev: That behavior…

Another TLDR would be; ASDF-stable is good enough that there isn't an incentive to update to a version of ASDF-devel that breaks backward compatibility.

So another Python 2 vs 3 situation?

Re: Common Lisp ASDF maintainer considers resignation

#8
post #4
post #3

For (way) more context see https://gist.github.com/phoe/7d24bdb1f2be76a02fecba8cfecbef3...

TLDR; "Dev: Oh, you must have been using undocumented behavior of ASDF. Your code will continue to work as before, but if you change this #\- to a #\/ it'll stop complaining. User: Our code used to work in ASDF-stable. Any warning at all breaks our build, so it's broken in ASDF-devel. Just make it work like it did in ASDF-stable again. ... User: That undocumented behavior works well for us, though. Dev: That behavior…

Warnings breaking builds is something you should opt in to with the knowledge that warnings are not part of the fixed public API of the thing you're building against/using as a dependency.

That's the whole point of warnings in the first place - they're a way to communicate that people might be doing something wrong, without hard failing their builds. Otherwise what would be the difference between a warning and an error?

Likewise, opting in to warnings as failures in your build system is a perfectly reasonable decision if you want to be strict about quality, and catch potential issues early. But the fix for a warning you don't want to treat as a warning is to just suppress it somehow (or fix it anyway if it isn't a complete false positive), not demand the maintainer remove it.

(Note I'm just replying to the context of your TLDR, not the whole situation, which I haven't read through yet.)

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