Wow: I think QuickLisp will change my Common Lisp development setup

I have been experimenting with the beta for QuickLisp.org and it looks very good. I never disliked the ASDF package management system, but QuickLisp looks to be easier to use and with a few hundred common Common Lisp already in the repository, getting most dependencies installed is quick and easy. Good job Zach!

For many years I have been using a brute force approach to package management: in every project I work on, I have a utils directory where I un-tar the source code to all dependencies, and their dependencies, etc. I then locally
(push "utils/PACKAGE_DIR/" asdf:*central-registry*)
for all dependencies. This has always worked really well for me because I can ZIP up a project directory, rsync it to a server, and I am good to go with all dependencies. However, it is a pain to keep multiple copies of libraries in multiple projects. For reasons I don't even remember anymore, I never liked to use a global ASDF cache.

It will be a long weekend day project, but if I don't run into any serious problems with QuickLisp, I am going to clean up all of my Common Lisp projects to not use local copies of dependencies. I'll wait until the Common Lisp edition of my Semantic Web book is done, to avoid delaying that effort.

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