There have been many attempts in the past to subvert ASDF into something that allows this kind of effects (see asdf-system-connections), but the semantics of such connections is not very clear (to me at least), and being familiar with ASDF itself, I don't see how such tricks can be made reliable at all.
well, what i need is less than asdf-system-connections, because in my case the dependencies are explicit. i just want to have a word in the load order, also.
a-s-c wants to jump in automagically and load new systems if some other systems are already loaded. we used it for a while but after countless headaches we switched to explicit systems called project1+project2+project3 that depended on the 3 projects and listed what else to load.
before, or it's not, and might be loaded before or after and you can't retroactively unload and reload the system to have logging magically take effect.
i'm programming for long enough to have learnt to make compromises, and i'd be happy to rmfasl and reload when i'm about to debug something.
and re :system-depends-on, it bit me hard. took me hours of debugging why a file is being compiled/loaded twice while i was reinstalled http://dwim.hu and building the sbcl executable that runs on it (the symptom was a warning from defpackage about already exported symbols, it stopped the build).
i was suspecting all kind of weird issues until i've unpulled this patch from hu.dwim.reiterate.
for now, i'm ok. i'll just make sure i don't pull this patch to the live system...
thanks for the help!