Drakma uses its own type OCTET as element-type for streams it's defined as (deftype octet () '(unsigned-byte 8))
But read-byte and friends don't recognize type because it's not expanded before-hand. So, what I did is to apply EXPAND-DEFTYPE beforehand. Perhaps UPGRADED-ELEMENT-TYPE would've been better, or something entirely different in an another place or more places. But it allows me to use drakma successfully.
So, one can do (push :drakma-no-ssl *features*) ;; I can't load CFFI needed for cl+ssl
(asdf:load-system :drakma)
(drakma:http-request "http://bing.com") => fancy results
On another note, I couldn't get usocket to work on Debian until I discovered that I need to either do echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/bindv6only or launch java with -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
Otherwise usocket returns a very cryptic error SOCKET-TYPE-NOT-SUPPORTED-ERROR which is in reality "java.net.SocketException: Network is unreachable".