It's probably safest and wisest to not make this change. Sorry for wasting time. Here are some words which may answer your questions, but are safe to ignore: I've only tested it on {sbcl ccl ecl clisp lispworks allegro cmu} on {linux bsd macos windows}. Windows doesn't have effective symbolic links, so unfortunately this doesn't work on it. Although it does work under POSIX compatibility like cygwin. Unfortunately I don't know if it works on Mezzano or Genera. I'm unsure about ABCL, Clasp, and Corman since I haven't yet been able to run on those. I think this should only happen when the link target base name is not ‘equal’ to the one given, so it's only dependent on the behaviour of pathanme-name not on any OS specific thing. I don't think there's any change to the user's configuration that can achieve this. Making a long set of changes to the user's ASDF configuration e.g. source-registry.conf, seems difficult and inappropriate. I know ASDF already supports ths case of: /some/path/foo.asd -> /a/different/path/foo.asd This change is for the cases where the base name differs: foo.asd -> bar.asd /the/same/path/foo.asd -> /the/same/path/bar.asd /some/path/foo.asd -> /a/different/path/bar.asd so when you ask to load "foo" it can load "bar". Everything else is the same as if you asked to load "bar".