Apologies I mistakenly sent this to sbcl-Devel rather than asdf-Devel list thanks to my pudgy fingers and iPhone...
The changes to upcoming asdf sound amazing. I know there has been a huge investment in Devel/debugging etc, and full documentation is not a reasonable expectation at this point, but I wonder if it might be possible to include a few model systems which demonstrate what will be considered basic best practice with the new ASDF and exemplifying recommended usage of some of these new and replacement features/practices.
Basically I'm just hoping to avoid any future situation where I build systems and layered functionality in a manner which seems reasonable but may contradict the popular opinion of what constitutes good system design. For example, in the past I used asdf component properties quite a bit as my local transient annotation slot for working on systems dynamically at runtime.
If there are a few examples demonstrating proper use of the new functionalities (perhaps referencing the prior usage it supersedes when appropriate) It would probably be even more helpful to facilitate migration to exploit the new ASDF capabilities than formal reference style documentation... From such examples it will then be a simple matter to focus in for study of the relevant portions of the new asdf source code.
Thanks to all the asdf volunteers for all of the work done to improve this important facility which in turn seems likely to substantially improve the whole common-lisp ecosystem as a viable, modern choice for development platform.