Comment 4 for bug 620579

1- upgradability is essential as a way for users to be confident they only need to make their software work against one version of ASDF, the latest released one. Outside this promise lies madness. Read my ILC2010 paper (when it's out), or my article "Software Irresponsibility"
http://fare.livejournal.com/149264.html

2- one thing is being able to use symbols from :cl, another thing is being guaranteed that you can bind and fbind symbols using let, let*, flet and labels without be caught by any interesting special or constant declaration or package lock. Running the big bootstrap form from cl-user is a bad idea. But yeah, if ASDF-BOOTSTRAP is a problem, I could try using a conditional MAKE-PACKAGE to bootstrap ASDF from a simpler version of itself. Sigh.

3- I can see a point in both sides. I probably wouldn't have created this ASDF-UTILITIES package if something similar hadn't existed since ASDF 1 days. I think this discussion ought to be on asdf-devel.