I thought I had understood your question, but now I see that I did not. Let me see if I have this right:

There are pre-packaged CL systems (sources) like cl-alexandria
There are additionally binary systems corresponding to the pre-packaged systems, like cl-alexandria-sbcl

Are you trying to do the following:

If the prepackaged CL source systems and their binaries are present, then ASDF should be configured so that the output-translations point ASDF to the packaged binaries.
If a prepackaged CL source system is present and the binary package is not present, then ASDF should be configured so that the binaries from building the prepackaged systems go into the user's cache directory somewhere, because the user will typically not be able to write to the location of the packaged binaries

If that is so, maybe when a package like cl-alexandria is installed, it should write an entry to the output translations to write fasls to the user's directory, and then when a package like cl-alexandria-sbcl is written, the output translations should be updated to delete the original entry and add a new entry that points to the packaged fasl directory.

Note that I think this could be done by writing to files in /etc or some similar location.

Honestly, I don't know what to do if the binary package has some but not all fasls. That would be a mess.

Hello Robert,

Thank you for your response.

We loop over the locations where compiled code is stored to build the output translations, as shown in the code below.

(defvar *freebsd-output-translations* ())
(pushnew :inherit-configuration *freebsd-output-translations*)
(dolist (path (directory "/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/*/"))
(unless (and (pathnamep path)
(search *system-registry*
(namestring path)
:start1 0 :end1 (length *system-registry*)))
(let ((source (make-pathname
:directory (append (pathname-directory path)
(list :wild-inferiors))))
(target (make-pathname
:directory (append (pathname-directory path)
(list (lisp-specific-fasl-subdir) :wild-inferiors)))))
(pushnew (list source target) *freebsd-output-translations*))))
(asdf:initialize-output-translations (cons :output-translations *freebsd-output-translations*))

The files in our CL OS packages are stored under /usr/local/lib/common-lisp/<project>/. The FASL packages put compiled code in directories unique to each lisp implementation such as /usr/local/lib/common-lib/<project>/sbclfasl, /usr/local/lib/common-lisp/<package_name>/cclfasl/, and so on.

Before the call to asdf:initialize-output-translations, *freebsd-output-translations* looks correct (if I'm understanding the DSL format):

(:OUTPUT-TRANSLATIONS
(#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/gpgme/**/"
#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/gpgme/sbclfasl/**/")
(#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/asdf/**/"
#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/asdf/sbclfasl/**/")
(#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/alexandria/**/"
#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/alexandria/sbclfasl/**/")
:INHERIT-CONFIGURATION)

The part that I'm still missing is how to add locations to the exceptions to output translations.

Kind regards,
Joe

P.S. After the call to asdf:initialize-output-translations, dumping asdf::*output-translations* gives:

(((#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/gpgme/sbclfasl/**/" T)
(#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/asdf/sbclfasl/**/" T)
(#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/alexandria/sbclfasl/**/" T)
(#P"/usr/home/jrm/.cache/common-lisp/sbcl-2.4.10-bsd-x64-s/**/*.*" T)
(#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/gpgme/**/"
#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/gpgme/sbclfasl/**/")
(#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/asdf/**/"
#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/asdf/sbclfasl/**/")
(#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/alexandria/**/"
#P"/usr/local/lib/common-lisp/alexandria/sbclfasl/**/")
(#P"/home/jrm/.cache/common-lisp/my-dir/**/*.*" T)
(#P"/usr/local/lib/sbcl/**/*.*" T)
(#P"/**/*.*" #P"/home/jrm/.cache/common-lisp/my-dir/**/*.*")
(T #P"/usr/home/jrm/.cache/common-lisp/sbcl-2.4.10-bsd-x64-s/**/*.*")))

Robert P. Goldman
Research Fellow
Smart Information Flow Technologies (d/b/a SIFT, LLC)

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