Apologies in advance in the likely event this is Pilot Error.

Am trying to write a gui for quicklisp.  Testing on various platforms (Raspberry Pi, linux/SBCL, linux/CCL) with various vintages of ASDF produces differing behavior.  In particular, quickloading a system which depends upon McCLIM from the McCLIM-based gui screws up (I haven't tracked down the exact problem, but I could understand why unconditionally reloading McCLIM while it's running could get weird).

After some digging (and rebuilding various versions of SBCL up to 1.1.9), I got as far as seeing asdf:load-system behavior diverging from 2.26 (SBCL 1.0.9) to both 2.32 (CCL 1.9) and 3.0.2 (both SBCL and CCL).  AFAICT 2.26 load-system does not unconditionally load an already-loaded system (behaving like and perhaps redundant to asdf:require-system).  2.32 and 3.0.2 load-system unconditionally load systems, and require-system does not.  I think I understand why the newer vintages do this.

The issue for me is loading systems that :depend-on McCLIM from inside a McCLIM frame command.  In my naivety, I would think that the :depends-on systems should be required rather than loaded (if you've patched them, say, you wouldn't want the patch hammered).  For my own stuff, I guess I could require prerequisite systems within the asd file rather than :depending-on them, but this seems wrong (breaks introspection?) - so wrong I feel I may be going about this entirely the wrong way.