-README,v 1.35 2003/08/05 23:00:32 kevinrosenberg Exp -*- Text -*-
+README,v 1.39 2006/08/21 10:52:32 crhodes Exp -*- Text -*-
+
+The canonical documentation for asdf is in the file asdf.texinfo.
+The significant overlap between this file and that will one day be
+resolved by deleting text from this file; in the meantime, please look
+there before here.
+
asdf: another system definition facility
asdf is extensible to new operations and to new component types. This
allows the addition of behaviours: for example, a new component could
-be added for Java JAR archives, and methods specialised on
-compile-op added for it that would accomplish the relevant
-actions.
+be added for Java JAR archives, and methods specialised on compile-op
+added for it that would accomplish the relevant actions. Users
+defining their own operations and component types should inherit from
+the asdf base classes asdf:operation and asdf:component respectively.
* Inspiration
not overwrite each others operations. The user may also wish to (and
is recommended to) include defpackage and in-package forms in his
system definition files, however, so that they can be loaded manually
-if need be.
+if need be. It is not recommended to use the CL-USER package for this
+purpose, as definitions made in this package will affect the parsing
+of asdf systems.
For convenience in the normal case, and for backward compatibility
with the spirit of mk-defsystem, the default contents of
if the user loads up the .asd file into his editor and
interactively re-evaluates that form
-* Error handling
+ * Error handling
It is an error to define a system incorrectly: an implementation may
detect this and signal a generalised instance of
-SYSTEM-DEFINITION-ERROR
+SYSTEM-DEFINITION-ERROR.
Operations may go wrong (for example when source files contain
errors). These are signalled using generalised instances of
-OPERATION-ERROR
+OPERATION-ERROR, with condition readers ERROR-COMPONENT and
+ERROR-OPERATION for the component and operation which erred.
* Compilation error and warning handling
This uses unexported symbols. What would be a nice interface for this
functionality?
+** patches
+
+Sometimes one wants to
+
+
* missing bits in implementation
** all of the above