Re: Looking for help with packaging a Common Lisp library

[Konrad Hinsen]

Pierre Neidhardt <address@hidden> writes:

> The Guix package recreates the .asd file (without the
> defsystem-depends-on), which is why it worked in Quicklisp but not in
> Guix.

OK, that makes sense.

> We could merge Guillaume's patch, but first I'd like to make sure that
> this is not an upstream bug.  Isn't cffi-grovel supposed to be added to
> the :depends-on list instead?

I am certainly not the right person to answer that question. But here's
what the ASDF manual says:

   The :defsystem-depends-on option to defsystem allows the programmer
   to specify another ASDF-defined system or set of systems that must be
   loaded before the system definition is processed. Typically this is
   used to load an ASDF extension that is used in the system definition.

This looks like what the cffi-grovel manual suggests, with an example:

   
https://common-lisp.net/project/cffi/manual/html_node/Groveller-ASDF-Integration.html#Groveller-ASDF-Integration

In hdf5-cffi.asd, some components are labelled :cffi-grovel-file,
which looks like an ASDF extension provided by cffi-grovel. If that is
true, then the :defsystem-depends-on is necessary. A quick test supports
that hypothesis: if you remove the line, the system fails to load.

Cheers,
  Konrad.