Stupid ASDF tricks -- recovering from hardlinking instead of symlinking the .asd file

This is a mirror of a post I just made to c.l.lisp, and I thought it'd make a good blog entry, too.

Yesterday I accidentally hardlinked an .asd into my asdf *central-registry*, and then tried to load-op the system, which of course failed.

When I deleted the hardlink and changed it to a symlink, load-op continued to fail.

I believe (and I could be wrong) asdf loaded the .asd file, decided that the source was in the *central-registry* directory, and looked for it there forever after.

How do you get asdf to reprocess the asd file and/or its new location? Load-op doesn't do it.

... Before posting, I did a couple more searches, and found the answer (here), and I suppose it should have occurred to me last night. Oh well. I'll go ahead and post the answer for posterity.

Simply reload the .asd file directly:

The error:

CL-USER 1 > (asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op 'puri)
; loading system definition from /home/lmc/lisp/systems/puri.asd into
; #<The ASDF0 package, 0/16 internal, 0/16 external>
; Loading text file /big2/home/lmc/lisp/systems/puri.asd
; registering #<SYSTEM PURI 218A4A17> as PURI
; registering #<SYSTEM PURI-TESTS 21895317> as PURI-TESTS
;;; Compiling file /big2/home/lmc/lisp/systems/src.lisp ...
[snip various messages]
Error: The file #P"/big2/home/lmc/lisp/systems/src.lisp" does not exist.
  1 (continue) Try opening #P"/big2/home/lmc/lisp/systems/src.lisp" again.
  2 Try compiling /big2/home/lmc/lisp/systems/src.lisp again.
  3 Skip compiling /big2/home/lmc/lisp/systems/src.lisp.
  4 Retry performing #<ASDF:COMPILE-OP NIL 200A1DA7> on
    #<ASDF:CL-SOURCE-FILE "src" 2189C71F>.
  5 Continue, treating #<ASDF:COMPILE-OP NIL 200A1DA7> on
    #<ASDF:CL-SOURCE-FILE "src" 2189C71F> as having been successful.
  6 (abort) Return to level 0.
  7 Return to top loop level 0.
Type :b for backtrace, :c <option number> to proceed,  or :? for
other options
CL-USER 2 : 1 > :top

The fix (run from the registry directory):

% ln -fs ../puri-1.5.1/puri.asd .

The recovery:

CL-USER 3 > (load "lisp/systems/puri.asd")
; Loading text file /big2/home/lmc/lisp/puri-1.5.1/puri.asd
[snip some warnings about methods redefined]
#P"/big2/home/lmc/lisp/puri-1.5.1/puri.asd"
CL-USER 4 > (asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op 'puri)
; Loading fasl file /big2/home/lmc/lisp/puri-1.5.1/src.ufasl
NIL
CL-USER 5 >

It just goes to show, when all else fails, read the directions.

tags: asdf  

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