A source file is any file that the system does not know how to generate from other components of the system.
Note that this is not necessarily the same thing as “a file containing data that is typically fed to a compiler”. If a file is generated by some pre-processor stage (e.g. a .h file from .h.in by autoconf) then it is not, by this definition, a source file. Conversely, we might have a graphic file that cannot be automatically regenerated, or a proprietary shared library that we received as a binary: these do count as source files for our purposes.
Subclasses of source-file exist for various languages. FIXME: describe these.
A module is a collection of sub-components.
A module component has the following extra initargs:
:componentsthe components contained in this module
:default-component-classAll children components which don’t specify their class explicitly are inferred to be of this type.
:if-component-dep-failsThis attribute was removed in ASDF 3. Do not use it. Use
:if-featureinstead (see required-features, and see if-feature-option).
:serialWhen this attribute is set, each subcomponent of this component is assumed to depend on all subcomponents before it in the list given to
:components, i.e. all of them are loaded before a compile or load operation is performed on it.
The default operation knows how to traverse a module, so most operations will not need to provide methods specialised on modules.
module may be subclassed to represent components such as
foreign-language linked libraries or archive files.
system is a subclass of
A system is a module with a few extra attributes for documentation purposes; these are given elsewhere. See The defsystem grammar.
Users can create new classes for their systems:
defsystem macro takes a
:class keyword argument.