I agree with James that a bootstrapped asdf would be elegant. Unhappily it wouldn't be practical. asdf being only one file is very useful for many reasons. It being one directory would not be too bad, but still one file is better. pjb has a nice suggestion that we could split it in many files and have some build tool concatenate those files for distribution. That would work for me, but nowhere near at the top of my todo list.
As pjb says, my main concerns are about
(a) Upgradability
Making asdf self-upgradable, so we no more have the horror of having to deal with antique prepackaged asdf's.
(b) Site and user configuration
Minimizing setup complexity for non-experts.
(c) Asdf binary locations / asdf output locations
ABL was already merged into ASDF by gwking. While I think it was a generally good move, it fails (b), and I think can and should be redone better.
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