A few days ago I linked to a report showing a lot of systems that failed to build. They failed because I added an option in the Quicklisp build environment that signals an error if a system lacks the description, author, and license metadata.
This isn't a standard feature of ASDF or Quicklisp. No projects are going to be dropped next month because of it. It's an optional piece of the build system, one that I added so I could see how many systems are missing that useful data and how likely it is that people will care.
I really want to use the :description option and show it as output in the REPL when searching for systems with something like system-apropos. I also want to make it easy to quickly determine the license of a given system, so you can figure out if it's compatible with your project. And having author information readily available will make it easier to contact someone regarding the project.
ASDF system metadata is a good choice for storing this information because it's not Quicklisp-specific. Anyone can gather and use this data if it's present in the systems. I hope that in the future every system in every project will have as much useful and accurate metadata as possible.
So what should you do if you want to help with this goal?
First, if you maintain a system and it's in the report, please update each of its system definitions with :description, :author, and :license information. A good description should be no longer than a tweet,and give an idea of what the system is for. The author information should include a name and email address. The license should be short and refer to a well-known license if possible, or give information about where to read the full license otherwise.
If you're not the maintainer of a system, but you want to file an issue or bug report, consider making a polite request to the author that they update their systems to include the extra info. (If you can, make sure nobody else has submitted the request first.)
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