the patch which was enclosed in the earlier message[2] demonstrated
an implementation which modifies the three functions - component-
pathname, input-files, and output-files, extends the function which
constructs the component absolute pathname, and adds a function to
map between logical and physical pathname components. [...]

we can discuss the general utility of logical pathnames at length, at
your leisure. elsewhere. my enquiry concerns whether logical pathname
translations would serve as a more compact implementation mechanism
for asdf output translations than the present method.

>
> And even then you'll have a hard time fixing things that users
> can now trivially do with the following translation:
>
> (:root ("C:/my/cl/cache" :implementation))
>
> This will work and make his file in
>   \\remote-host\myshare\cl\cl-foo\foo-V2.000\bar_baz.lisp
> be compiled as obvious from the spec into
>   C:\my\cl\cache\sbcl-1.0.38-windows-x86\remote-host\myshare\cl\cl-
> foo\foo-V2.000\bar_baz.fasl

this would appear to be the equivalent of a translation on the order of

 `("**;*.*.* ,(concatenate 'string "C:/my/cl/cache/"
                                   (asdf::implementation-identifier)
                                   "/**/*.*.*"))