Could SLIME adopt ASDF as a way to compile itself and other software?
I understand that ASDF was quite insufficient for the needs of SLIME back in the bad old days, but these days, ASDF 2 (1) is available via (require "asdf") on *every* implementation that has been released in the last two years (i.e. not on corman gcl genera rmcl scl - though it runs on all of them) (2) already manages a decent FASL cache so SLIME doesn't have to. (3) can upgrade itself correctly if needed.
ASDF has also improved a lot in the last few years. The upcoming release 2.27 formalizes a lot of the portability support that had accumulated through the years, improves on it, and adds features like condition control, saving of deferred warnings, image dump and restore, etc.
In any case, that would be as much bad code duplication that could die.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. — Dijkstra