Create new asdf-installer repo?
For better or worse, it's unlikely the major open source CL implementation (SBCL) will upgrade their bundled version of ASDF. Additionally, some people may want to use an older CL (any implementation) and use a newer ASDF than it bundles. While it's already pretty trivial to install a newer version of ASDF, it'd be nice to have a way to do it completely within Common Lisp.
@mherda and I have been chatting about this and think it'd be nice to have a project similar to quicklisp-slime-helper. It could be quickloaded and then a single command would update your Lisp init file to load any particular version of ASDF. The bare minimum would include every release of ASDF in the project repo so it doesn't even need to use git or an HTTPS client to download ASDF.
We haven't talked about it yet, but I think it would also be cool to optionally add git and/or HTTPS support so you could install the latest updates even if Quicklisp hasn't updated the installer project yet. It would also be nice to expose functionality to just install and compile ASDF somewhere (and not modify your init file), for use in projects that want to easily bundle a copy of ASDF for distribution.
@mherda has agreed to maintain the project (at least the parts I described above as "bare minimum"). But we think it would be best to host it under the asdf group on this Gitlab install. That way the ASDF team can help move things along if needed and it's easier to tie into our CI (so that whenever we push a new tag the installer project gets auto-updated as well).
Thoughts?