Attached are patches in 'abcl-asdf.patch' to get asdf-1.641 to work against ABCL for the run-tests.sh.
Unfortunately, you will need to build [ABCL from trunk][1] using at least svn r12550, because I had to patch ABCL to work with ASDF. And you'll need to apply the 'abcl-translate-pathname.patch'.
[1]: svn://common-lisp.net/project/armedbear/svn/trunk/abcl
Notes:
1. The fugliness of the conditional around ASDF:GET-UID works around a bug in the ABCL compiler. We are in the process of [analyzing the error][2].
[2]: http://trac.common-lisp.net/armedbear/ticket/89
2. There is some undiagnosed problem in translating the binary location for the new ASDF2 "~/.cache" conventions, as ABCL seems to "collapses" everything into a single directory. Somehow, the default *output-translations* have a "/**/**/*.*" where there should be "/**/*.*". I'm not sure if this is a problem in "abcl-translate-pathname.patch", which is why I didn't apply this to ABCL trunk.
3. ASDF's run-tests.sh seems to ignore the "flags" setting, which seems to be broken on the ASDF side.
4. The changes for ASDF look quite interesting. However I would advocate that you should make ASDF2 work *exactly* like ASDF1 out of the box, meaning you shouldn't do any of the subsumed ASDF-BINARY-LOCATIONS stuff without being asked to by configuration.