asia
ASIA (ASDF2 Software Installation Assistant) is a trivial Common Lisp project installer. It acts like an ASDF2 extension and installs the projects without dependencies. Dependency analysis is done by ASDF2.

It's written by Desmond O. Chang and released under MIT-License.

The source code is on Github.

Quick assessment (2024-03-02)

  • Not actively developed, so it requires a few modifications for ASDF 3+.
  • As we'll see, ASIA does fit the definition of trivial from a certain viewpoint.
  • However, the reality is that ASDF is an extremely opinionated platform.
  • Therefore, building anything on top of ASDF is decidedly non-trivial.
Anyway, ASIA is rather nice for its conceptual elegance:

  • It leverages the file system as a kind of "object database."
  • So each object is a directory, and its properties are files.
  • You have a "manifest," which is a project database (e.g. repo51).
  • A project "object" points to a repository, which will contain systems.
  • A system "object" links to the project (e.g. iolib.base points to iolib).
  • ASIA uses pregexp to guess the backend from the repository URL.
  • How the project database is created, exactly, is left up to the user.