I pushed Juanjo's patch for :ASDF-DEPENDENCIES as 1.704, except that I renamed the feature :SYSTEM-DEPENDENCIES. Maybe it should have been :SYSTEM-DEPENDS-ON. Ahem. You tell me what you think. As for optional dependencies, I think things like ASDF-SYSTEM-CONNECTIONS are a walking nightmare, and horrible bugs waiting to happen. If you want to layer your system, just have foo-minimal or foo-core for the core functionality, and foo or foo-all for the whole system with all the dependencies. Trying to confuse the two under one name is but bugs waiting to happen. Finally, considering the naming of things in the target package before it has been defined -- cl-launch usually stores forms like that as a string to be read and eval'ed after the system has been loaded. XCVB on the other hand has a call procedure that takes package + symbol designators as arguments to specify what to funcall after the package is ready. [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ] "I think sex is better than logic, but I can't prove it." — Monty Python