Hi all,
For what little they're worth, here are my votes on the topic.
Q: Have Quicklisp distribute Slime? A: Sure! (Doesn't it already?)
Q: Have Slime rely on ASDF? A: Sure. The current Slime loader is generally reliable, but there is something to be said for pooling effort in a common solution, and ASDF has really improved in recent years.
Q: Have Slime rely on Quicklisp? A: No way! You've got this all backwards. Quicklisp adds downloading, dependency management, and such to ASDF. It also assumes a network connection and a certain level of trust in the repository.
Q: Have Slime rely on make? A: ?!?? GNU Make maybe, but it is essentially a non-starter on MSWin, Android, iOS, ....
Thinking about an ideal, non-Quicklisp-assisted install, could something like the following work?
- download and extract Slime (zip, tar.gz, or txz) - open slime-install.lisp in Emacs - follow some instructions that start an interactive session that configures and installs (or upgrades) Slime
Later, Daniel