Fail to use quicklisp with clozure-cl

Question

While using SBCL normally I want to try CCL for some testing and installed it via homebrew on my computer. That worked fine but I fail to use quicklisp with CCL. If I try to load quicklisp's setup.lisp I get the following error message:

➜  ~ ccl64
Clozure Common Lisp Version 1.11.6  DarwinX8664

For more information about CCL, please see http://ccl.clozure.com.

CCL is free software.  It is distributed under the terms of the Apache
Licence, Version 2.0.
? (require 'asdf)
ASDF
("uiop" "UIOP" "asdf" "ASDF")
? (load "~/quicklisp/setup.lisp")                        
> Error: There is no package named "ASDF/SYSTEM-REGISTRY" .
> While executing: CCL::%FASL-NVPACKAGE, in process listener(1).
> Type :GO to continue, :POP to abort, :R for a list of available restarts.
> If continued: Retry finding package with name "ASDF/SYSTEM-REGISTRY".
> Type :? for other options.
1 > :POP

I couldn't find a simple solution searching the web. CCL comes with ASDF as (require 'ASDF) is working. In quicklisp's documentation I couldn't find anything about extra efforts to use it with two lisp implementations in parallel.

If I check ASDF's version as suggested here I get "3.1.5" as installed version, which should be quite recent.

Is there anything obvious I am missing?

Answer 1

I think I found it: I had some old data in my ~/.cache directory from another attempt to install ccl. After deleting it, I can load quicklisp's setup.lisp without any error.

Please advice If I should delete my question or leave it here to prevent others from repeating my errors.

Answer 2

Please note that various Lisps have some startup files. Some of them are by default:

• SBCL: ~/.sbclrc
• CLISP: ~/.clisprc.lisp
• Clozure: ~/.ccl-init.lisp

From the documentation of CCL:

By default, Clozure CL will look for a file named ccl-init.lisp in your home directory, and load it upon startup. On Unix systems, it will also look for .ccl-init.lisp.

CCL uses an ordinary lisp file called ccl-init.lisp which on unix systems is usually put on your home path. So you can add the following lines in that file (on my Ubuntu machine it's path is /home/me/.ccl-init.lisp) which instructs CCL to load quicklisp upon startup:

#-quicklisp
(let ((quicklisp-init (merge-pathnames "quicklisp/setup.lisp"
                                       (user-homedir-pathname))))
  (when (probe-file quicklisp-init)
    (load quicklisp-init)))

This is enough for enabling your CCL to communicate with quicklisp.