[slime-devel] Swank-loader.lisp and swank.asd and Distributor's needs

[Tobias C. Rittweiler]

Slime does not use ASDF which I think makes sense as it makes Slime
standalone, and I guess more easily usable on e.g. Windows.

However, from glancing at what distributions do to deploy Slime, it
seems they have the following needs:

  - They want to split slime into Slime (emacs stuff), and swank (CL
    stuff).

  - for Slime, they want to make use of their existing Emacs
    infrastructure. I.e. install slime into /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/.

  - For Swank, they want to make use of their existing CL
    infrastructure, that is ASDF. Put the sources to
    /usr/share/common-lisp/, and configure ASDF-Binary-Locations
    (nowadays included into ASDF upstream) so fasls are created in
    user-specific directories.


For myself, I'd like if swank.asd would not just be a stub but specified
the file dependencies to make M-x slime-query-replace-system work.

It seems like we'd have to maintain file dependencies and file loading
in two places, swank-loader.lisp and swank.asd. May there be a better
solution?

  -T.