Comment 7 for bug 479478

Thank you both for the detailed answers.

Fare, TEST-REPORT-OP sounds even more complicated than my current solutions -- it keeps the trick of using serialization to cross the asdf-to-user-code-barrier that I am already using, but also enlists the filesystem. I'll reiterate that what drove me here is not the matter of consolidating libraries or the coordination problem (although of course here I am reporting my issue with ASDF -- I think if your consolidation process had an 11th step this would be it), but that I am looking for a direct way to acquire the return value of running a test suite as the product of testing a system with asdf.

I'm not suggesting that all operations return their perform value, just test-op -- so I think nondeterminism would not be an issue (but I am not familiar with the inner workings of asdf).

Robert, thanks for the expedients. They are similar to what I have been experimenting with. One I have toyed with is to have my test suite always signal a non-error condition which just wraps the test results. That way a script could error if the condition is never signaled, and otherwise behave according to the test results. I think in many common cases these solutions are less obvious and more complicated than what would be available if asdf:test-system returned the result of the user's testing.

I'm not entirely sure if the remaining objection is just that it might be prohibitively difficult to implement, or if also my proposed behavior would be antithetical to asdf's design.