Faré fahree@gmail.com writes:
More importantly, we keep matching versions of swank and slime in our version control system. If you want to attach to a server, make sure you're using the appropriate SLIME. This way we could debug years-old production servers using obsolete versions of SWANK, if only we had any.
Quicklisp does actually aim to help in this regard. Project archives and metadata are kept long-term, with the aim of going back to previous sets of working configurations as needed. That includes swank and slime. (Of course, there's no guarantee that the old software works with the new Lisp implementations, and Quicklisp currently doesn't make any effort to archive e.g. SBCL snapshots...)
The API to take advantage of this long-term stability hasn't been exposed, yet.
Zach