a portable installer that can automatically check out and update source repositories would help a lot though! but that's a different story...
What does "portable" mean? Between Lisps or between OSes?
portable between lisps.
i can very well live without integration with the OS package manager... that 1% of the projects that need external tools can print a copy&paste-able apt-get line which is good enough until we'll have a better OS replacing linux (i.e. indefinitely long).