by now the time on spent discussing this would have easily been enough to fix all of them twice over, and to add a section to the top of the manual, with bold, that lists the global state that ASDF guarantees and isolates.
I've sent patches to all 16 libraries that depended on *read-default-float-format* being either 'single-float (15) or 'double-float (1). And committed them to the repositories where I have write access.
Additionally, my ASDF syntax-control branch has a mechanism that allows systems to specify variables they want to bind around their system, so you could specify: (defsystem foo :variables ((*read-default-float-format* . (constantly double-float))) ...) where the assoc'ed value is a specification as per ensure-function, which lets you specify a string "(lambda () (not-yet-created-package:foo 1 2 3))"
I'll now modify it so its strict syntax mode is optional. It's easier to argue out of working code.
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