Slime does not use ASDF which I think makes sense as it makes Slime standalone, and I guess more easily usable on e.g. Windows.
However, from glancing at what distributions do to deploy Slime, it seems they have the following needs:
- They want to split slime into Slime (emacs stuff), and swank (CL stuff).
- for Slime, they want to make use of their existing Emacs infrastructure. I.e. install slime into /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/.
- For Swank, they want to make use of their existing CL infrastructure, that is ASDF. Put the sources to /usr/share/common-lisp/, and configure ASDF-Binary-Locations (nowadays included into ASDF upstream) so fasls are created in user-specific directories.
For myself, I'd like if swank.asd would not just be a stub but specified the file dependencies to make M-x slime-query-replace-system work.
It seems like we'd have to maintain file dependencies and file loading in two places, swank-loader.lisp and swank.asd. May there be a better solution?
-T.