Emacs and slime stopped cooperating for me

Question

I'm trying to use slime from CVS (2009-01-05) but keep getting this error:

       LOAD: A file with name
      /usr/share/common-lisp/source/slime/swank-loader.lisp does not exist

I've stripped my .emacs down to just:

(setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/bin/clisp")
(add-to-list 'load-path "/home/ssm/lisp/slime/")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)

I've deleted my ~/.slime directory, started with 'emacs -q' and eval'd the above code but I keep getting the LOAD error when I run slime (via M-x slime). Any ideas on how to fix this error?

FWIW, I've tried to install slime via apt-get but I keep getting errors there too about cl-swank being broken. That's a whole different story.

Answer 1

Have you purged the slime pkg you installed via apt-get? It looks like emacs is still reading the old site-specific configuration setup by apt-get. Try starting emacs with the -Q option, which prevents loading of site-specific (as well as user specific) customization, and see if the problem still occur.

Answer 2

I agree with huaiyuan that older files may be being picked up.

Try (load-file "/path/to/slime.el") instead of require. (You did remove the .elc files from your old versions, right? emacs will load from .elc files in preference to .el files, even when the .el is newer.)

The next thing to try is M-x customize-variable slime-backend and setting that to the absolute path of swank-loader.lisp. I think that will fix it for sure, but I am not sure why it doesn't work to begin with.