Comment 9 for bug 551222

A- Your choice design and it is wrong, since nothing excludes that an initial file knows ands loads the rest of it.

B- Nothing as such exists right now. And there are extensions which are transparent enough that people will not even know whether they use them or not -- for instance, concatenation of FASL files, which is essential for ECL.

C- This was the meat of it.

1- It is not just BUILDING it is RUNNING.
* If all existing libraries begin to depend on the existence of ASDF related functions, it will be impossible to do standalone programs without shipping ASDF with them.
* Moreover, programmers will have to program for ASDF, using ASDF tools to find its stuff.
* Even ASDF itself will not be able to build that software without that depedency.
* Forcing to shipASDF with a program is stupid, introducing a lot of problems because it exists, is there and will do things at boot time that are not wanted by the developers -- looking for configuration files, putting files in arbitary directories not controlled by the application developer, etc.
* So in short, making software depends on ASDF while running is bogus for transparent delivery. And it will become impossible to build other extensions for doing that.

2- and 3- can be coped with. A patch is uploaded that permits arbitrary logical pathnames resolving collisions.