First of all, Happy New Year and thank you to whomever is monitoring this list.  Your efforts are highly appreciated. 

Our build process for Gendl and GDL for the past several years has involved using monolithic-compile-bundle-op to make concatenated fasls, then loading these fasls into an empty image to create the final build. 

We do depend on (and include) uiop, but not asdf, in our final build product. 

In order to have uiop available separately for inclusion in the monolithic-compile-bundles, we have been putting a copy of the uiop/ directory (of the same version as the ASDF we're using) into quicklisp/local-projects/.

Some time between ASDF 3.2.0.1 and ASDF 3.3.1, the function check-not-old-asdf-system got modified to add "uiop" to the test (first line of the function). This results (in ASDF 3.3.1) in a same-version uiop not getting loaded at all into a monolithic-compile-bundle, even if the system of said monolithic-compile-bundle contains a dependency on uiop and uiop is available in quicklisp/local-projects/. 

For this reason, out-of-the-box  ASDF 3.3.1 was not working for our build process. I have "fixed" the problem temporarily by modifying my local asdf.lisp to remove the "uiop" from the test, i.e. I've replaced

   (or (not (member name '("asdf" "uiop") :test 'equal)) ....  

with

   (or (not (member name '("asdf") :test 'equal)) ...

as the first line of the defun check-not-old-asdf-system.

Question: Is there a supported way to do what I'm trying to do, without modifying the ASDF source code? Intuitively, it seems to me that we should be able to include uiop in build products using monolithic-compile-bundle-op, without including asdf.