Argh.
I've been away for the past several days, so I didn't see what was going on until now...
I apologize for my previous message, which I wrote in haste very soon after noticing the changes which had irked me. It was quite silly of me, I see now, to whine as I did, and I hope that it won't permanently damage cordiality of development between SLIME and my Swank back end for Scheme48: I now think that it may be better to keep SLIME48 in its own Darcs repository anyway, for several reasons, but I do still have some changes to SLIME in mind that I hope may still be considered later (when I formulate them specifically). I have no intention of actually forking SLIME any time soon; I'll try to maintain a working status between SLIME48's development & SLIME CVS, and periodically put out tarballs containing combinations of my Scheme48 back end and slime.el known to work.