This is totally intentional and well-documented.

Do NOT use the central-registry if you don't know what you're doing. Use the source-registry as recommended. (Or, if you truly insist, reinitialize the central-registry after upgrade; upgrading from ASDF 2 will create a fresh ASDF package; see asdf/tools/load-asdf.lisp for how to load ASDF while supporting backward compatibility back to ASDF 1 the hard way).

Do NOT use ASDF 2.26 (from October 2012), ever. Help me convince Xach to stop distributing that bitrotting piece of maintenance nightmare. Seriously, it's a shame that Quicklisp isn't distributing ASDF 3.1.7 (from May 2016), which is the very stable culmination of the 3.1 series and works great with all its systems. And I totally understand that Quicklisp must be conservative and should not upgrade to the latest 3.2.1 (from April 2017) yet. Considering how badly ASDF 2.26 now behaves when trying to load systems from Quicklisp, I wonder if Xach even ever tests it; I bet not. Alternatively, to show how utterly ridiculous his attitude is, convince him to distribute ASDF 1.85 (from May 2004) instead, the perfect gem that Dan Barlow bequeathed us (). Or no more recent 1.366 (from September 2009), the last version wholly untainted by my code contributions.

-#f


On May 3, 2017 2:23 PM, "James M. Lawrence" <llmjjmll@gmail.com> wrote:
Starting with a bare lisp image (e.g --no-userinit --no-sysinit for
SBCL), the following signals a "component not found" error:

(load "asdf-2.26.lisp")
;;; or whatever system you want
(push #p"~/quicklisp/dists/quicklisp/software/alexandria-20170227-git/"
      asdf:*central-registry*)
(load "asdf-3.2.1.lisp")
(asdf:load-system "alexandria")

The first bad commit is https://github.com/fare/asdf/commit/3a9457a

I hope this wasn't intentional? Ideally an old asdf version would
never get loaded, but practically speaking it sometimes does (e.g. on
LispWorks PE and CLISP). And if that happens, thereafter one is unable
to load a system that requires asdf-3. The above case is a
whittled-down version of a quickloading problem.

Best,
lmj