At the moment if a conform call fails (returning :clojure.spec/invalid) there is no way to supply extra information about why it failed. We do have the possibility to get explain-data, but at best this would return a spec form, the original value and some metadata.
While this is fine in most cases, some conformer functions upon failure can provide extra data that'd be useful to the consumer. A practical example we had was a spec that can contain values for a String based DSL (think SQL like), that would conform these values to their parsed AST. When the conform wrapped function fails it would throw an ex-info with line/col info and more metadata about the failure. But all this data was lost since we can only return :clojure.spec/invalid. All this happened inside a rule engine schema, that can contain hundreds of these; re-parsing all the failing values for error reporting is something we wanted to avoid.
The proposal would be to to support a new return value that'd allow conveying data about the conform failure, or to support both this new value and :clojure.spec/invalid.
This could take the form of (explain-info {..}) potentially returned by conformer function for later consumption by explain, to match clojure semantics with exceptions (ex-info/ex-data, explain-info/explain-data).
A more naive implementation could just allow to throw inside the conformer function and have the error merged/assoced into the explain map (but that might be a bit too invasive in my opinion).
