slime doesn't work with SBCL (& other Lisps?)

[Colin Howarth]

When attempting to start slime in Emacs (given a proper ~/.emacs file) one gets the error

; loading #P"/usr/share/common-lisp/source/slime/swank-loader.lisp"

debugger invoked on a SB-C::INPUT-ERROR-IN-COMPILE-FILE in thread #<THREAD "initial thread" RUNNING {AA65749}>:
   READ failure in COMPILE-FILE: SB-INT:SIMPLE-READER-PACKAGE-ERROR at 5611 (line 143, column 52)
     on #<SB-SYS:FD-STREAM for "file /usr/share/common-lisp/source/slime/swank-loader.lisp" {AA715E1}>:
   package "ASDF" not found

This error is similar to the one reported here:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=AANLkTimqShBdyZVYALN5Tpu8uyzeCTLTx9oUB5qX%3DpSf%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=sbcl-bugs

The solution is to replace the directory /usr/share/common-lisp/source/slime with the slime directory you get when you check it out from the CVS (as outlined in the report just mentioned) using

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous:<email address hidden>:/project/slime/cvsroot co slime

(see http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/#downloading)

My ~/.emacs file starts

(add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/share/common-lisp/source/slime/")
(setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/bin/sbcl")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)

Ubuntu 11.10

colin@mbp:~$ apt-cache policy cl-swank
cl-swank:
  Installed: 1:20100722-1
  Candidate: 1:20100722-1
  Version table:
 *** 1:20100722-1 0
        500 http://li.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric/universe i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Marc Migge (marcmigge)]

Overwriting the slime directory did not fix this for me. But adding

(require 'asdf)

to .sbclrc fixed it.