Slime/abcl version compatibility

[Luís Oliveira]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 5:31 PM, Alan Ruttenberg
<alanruttenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Rather than cluttering up the newer version what do you think of having
> slime include the older version and have the swank loader conditionally load
> old or new depending on the ABCL version?
>
> There is also slime maintenance cost associated with having it be backward
> compatible.

FWIW, swank-sbcl.lisp typically accrues conditionals for dealing with
older versions until sufficient time has passed (usually years) and
said conditionals become a nuisance.

Having two different swank implementations for older and newer ABCLs
seems worse than conditionals in terms of maintenance costs.
swank-sbcl.lisp contains various tricks for making conditionals more
manageable. Perhaps some of those practices might help in this case?

-- 
Luís Oliveira
http://kerno.org/~luis/