[Edited subject]
That begs the question: how should asdf be distributed?
Does it? I thought we were talking about asdf-driver.
Well, asdf-driver is currently developed together with asdf, which crucially depends on it. So how to distribute one with or without the other is a question; hopefully made less important by quicklisp.
Also, distributing asdf-driver separately from asdf makes for quadratic growth of potential upgrade issues to be wary of.
As asdf.lisp only?
Yes. As it always has been.
That is not the whole truth.
ASDF has been distributed in many ways; in order of chronology and progress, I can cite: * as a source file that you may load manually. * as code builtin to the image on Debian with C-L-C. * as part of some batteries-included Lisp distribution. * as a REQUIRE module provided by the Lisp implementation. * as a system and source file ready to upgrade any of the previous with a more advanced version on which you depend.
The latter solution has only worked since ASDF 2 (indeed, was the whole point of ASDF 2), and has allowed for some decoupling between what providers offer and was users may require, thus fostering nicer development.
These days, all actively-maintained implementations (except maybe SCL?) provide ASDF 2 as a REQUIRE module. Some of them are quite old (CLISP still provides 2.011), but all of them are able to locate a new ASDF in the source registry and upgrade themselves.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org Economic illiteracy often leads one to take for wealth creation or cost reduction what is only a forced displacement of activity, with no primary gain, and a lot of secondary costs and negative side-effects. — Faré