After some unplanned adventures asdf writes and reads fasls from implementation-specific directories. It was simple and the code is in the manual: simply put
(:output-translations (:root (:root :**/ :implementation-type :*.*.*)) :inherit-configuration)
in ~/.config/common-lisp/asdf-output-translations.conf
and it works like magic.
As :root is actually mentioned as magic in the manual, you can imagine how glad I am to have offered to contribute tutorial stuff :-) I will go through the code to try to demystify it for myself and try to find the words to explain it. Being a noob with configurations, maybe I should even try to explain this topic in the case of asdf.
However, I have one question: what is the reason that these output translations are apparently not applied to the .asd files? The way I understand my output-translations, I have globally specified that all fasls are in a implementation-specific directory just below my source files. For me, .asd files are just source files, so why not place them where the other fasls are written?
Hoping to hear,
Kind regards,
Ernst