Comment 15 for bug 1335323

One thing I'm wondering is: for the ordinary ASDF user (as opposed to, e.g., ITA), is the caching a net win? It certainly complicates the behavior and makes it history-dependent.

Fare, when you were building this, did you get a sense of how big the search space had to be before caching made a significant difference?

What would happen if this caching was off by default, and we put it on only when detecting a large search space?

I'd like to get a better sense that the proposed patch represents a principled solution to the stale cache issue, rather than a one-off fix for a particular problem.

E.g., what happens if we have a missing-dependency-of-version error and our solution is to install system foo v 1.1 to replace system foo v. 1.0 and the pathname now is foo-1.1? Now we have a stale cache for a return value that's not NIL.

I don't think we can simply clear the cache for the missing system, either, can we? I.e., we might find that in order to install FOO, we also install BAR and BAZ.