On Wed, Jan 08 2014, João Távora wrote:
But I'm also not necessarily opposed to recommending, bundling, or installing quicklisp. The latter too seem a little out of SLIME's jurisdiction though.
The problem "How do we get from a vanilla Lisp to one where we can do (require :asdf)" was solved by forcing every implementation to bundle ASDF. IMO, quicklisp is facing a similar problem. Should quicklisp use a similar "bundle it with the implementation" strategy? I think not, because a) it needs a lot of communication b) the bundled version gets outdated quickly.
<aside> As far as I understand, the "upgrade" mechanism in ASDF is only needed because the bundled version may be too old. </aside
I think this annoying but important problem could be solved more elegantly by agreeing on the name of a configuration file and the names of some configuration variables. If not a configuration file then a .init file, that we all agree to load from .sbclrc or .ccl-init etc.
Yes, this problem has not much to do with SLIME or Emacs but nobody else seems solve it or think about it much.
Helmut