I have applied this patch to my local installation of SLIME.
It enables me to point to the 'swank-loader' lisp in any location. It enables the user to bypass the original concatenation of SLIME-PATH and SLIME-BACKEND depending on whether SLIME-BACKEND is an absolute pathname or not.
In other words, if SLIME-BACKEND is an absolute pathname then the original procedure is bypassed, avoiding the concatenation of SLIME-PATH and SLIME-BACKEND. Otherwise, they are concatenated.
Whether you accept this specific logic or not, you should be aware that some installations do not want to put the emacs code and the lisp code in the same location. Hence, my conflict with the 'swank-loader' that I resolved with this patch.
--
Robert Lehr
(concatenate 'string "bozzio" "@" "the-lehrs" ".com" )