asdf vs. defsystem (was Re: [Maxima] Re: rebuild the installed image: how to?)

On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 10:52, Christophe Rhodes wrote:

> > This is from a patch Christophe Rhodes submitted some time ago.  So it
> > seems that loading Maxima as an ASDF system would also be an option.

> It would be nice.  I spoke to Jim a little about this kind of thing at
> the LSM back in the summer.  


(I'm reproducing some of our conversation here for the benefit of the
rest of the list.)

I chose defsystem for maxima purely because it looked like the most
popular lisp system-definition tool. I won't claim that the research I
did on the subject was very sophisticated. If someone were to present a
compelling reason to switch our build system to asdf, I would certainly
listen.

> The reason I generated an asdf system description for maxima was that
> it allowed me to investigate full compile-warnings without drowning in
> the compilation noise: there is an option that I use in asdf to stop
> the compilation (and provide suitable restarts) if compile-file
> returns a failure code. 

I don't think I realized that. The current compilation noise is
certainly sufficient to cause drowning.

I also didn't realize you already had a maxima.asd. Where is it? Did I
miss it in a message somewhere?

Does anyone else on the list have strong feelings on defsystem vs. asdf?

--Jim