On 3 Sep 2019, at 6:33, Andreas Davour wrote:

Others might have some more fruitful input, but I would suggest if using something else than GNU CLISP is an option at all, do it. It's an implementation with significant less support than say ccl or sbcl.

I'm going to second this. We try to test ASDF on clisp, but it's quite hard, since there's no authoritative release process that I can identify (note the 9 year old banner message on startup of your clisp). So I don't know what to test on, and I do not have time to build implementations from source solely in order to test them.

Quicklisp packages an ancient version of ASDF (six years old AFAICT). You should try at all costs not to load this, but to use a more up-to-date version, either grabbing it from our site or (hopefully) packaged with your CL implementation. It looks like the version from Quicklisp might be loaded first, and then ASDF is trying to upgrade itself, causing this error. Have your .clisprc (or whatever it's called) load an up-to-date ASDF first, and this problem should go away, since ASDF will not downgrade itself.

I wish Xach would get rid of this old version of ASDF, but there's some reason he won't, which may have to do with bad blood between him and Faré...