On 17 Nov 2021, at 12:32, Stelian Ionescu wrote:

You don't have to use the Quicklisp client to load dependencies, just to fetch them (as a package manager).
And for that, I think it should be always used this way.

That only works if you are using the QL libraries unchanged. If you need to patch or extend them, you need to set up a repo and handle things yourself.

I was doing a lot of work on Allegro back in the day, and I found that many of the libraries I encountered only worked properly on SBCL.

At that point I started always working from source repos, rather than initially getting from QL and then having to backtrack to source repo when the library broke.

So I am definitely not going to make ASDF just the build system for Quicklisp!

I am always willing to cooperate with Xach or anyone else to make ASDF work smoothly with QL, but ASDF will never be just a QL module.