Error starting sbcl under slime on Vista

Question

I'm having trouble getting SBCL to start under slime. I've messed things up and I don't know how to recover. This was working fine until I...

Had a problem loading a package via asdf. At which point I started debugging the asdf.lisp provided with SBCL to see what was going wrong. The sole change I made was to put a (break) in which I removed once I'd figured out what was wrong. All was fine until the next time I tried to start SBCL.

Then I got a swank compilation error saying that the asdf.fasl was older than the asdf.lisp file. That made sense to me so I recompiled the asdf.fasl. The output I'm now getting is:

(progn (load "c:\\emacs-23.1\\site-lisp\\slime\\swank-loader.lisp" :verbose t) (funcall (read-from-string "swank-loader:init")) (funcall (read-from-string "swank:start-server") "c:\\Users\\GILESR~1\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\slime.3068" :coding-system "iso-latin-1-unix"))

This is SBCL 1.0.37, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
More information about SBCL is available at <http://www.sbcl.org/&gt;.

SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses.  See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.

This is experimental prerelease support for the Windows platform: use
at your own risk.  "Your Kitten of Death awaits!"
* 
; loading #P"c:\\emacs-23.1\\site-lisp\\slime\\swank-loader.lisp"
; loading #P"c:\\hacking\\emacs\\.slime\\fasl\\2010-07-30\\sbcl-1.0.37-win32-x86\\swank-backend.fasl"
; loading #P"c:\\hacking\\emacs\\.slime\\fasl\\2010-07-30\\sbcl-1.0.37-win32-x86\\swank-source-path-parser.fasl"
; loading #P"c:\\hacking\\emacs\\.slime\\fasl\\2010-07-30\\sbcl-1.0.37-win32-x86\\swank-source-file-cache.fasl"

; compiling file "c:\\emacs-23.1\\site-lisp\\slime\\swank-sbcl.lisp" (written 22 JUL 2010 08:15:02 AM):

; file: c:\emacs-23.1\site-lisp\slime\swank-sbcl.lisp
; in: EVAL-WHEN (:COMPILE-TOPLEVEL :LOAD-TOPLEVEL :EXECUTE)
;     (REQUIRE 'SWANK-BACKEND::SB-BSD-SOCKETS)
; 
; caught ERROR:
;   (during compile-time-too processing)
;   The function ASDF::MODULE-PROVIDE-ASDF is undefined.

;     (REQUIRE 'SWANK-BACKEND::SB-INTROSPECT)
; 
; caught ERROR:
;   (during compile-time-too processing)
;   The function ASDF::MODULE-PROVIDE-ASDF is undefined.

;     (REQUIRE 'SWANK-BACKEND::SB-POSIX)
; 
; caught ERROR:
;   (during compile-time-too processing)
;   The function ASDF::MODULE-PROVIDE-ASDF is undefined.

;     (REQUIRE 'SWANK-BACKEND::SB-CLTL2)
; 
; caught ERROR:
;   (during compile-time-too processing)
;   The function ASDF::MODULE-PROVIDE-ASDF is undefined.
; 
; compilation unit aborted
;   caught 1 fatal ERROR condition
;   caught 4 ERROR conditions
;
; compilation aborted because of fatal error:
;   SB-INT:SIMPLE-READER-PACKAGE-ERROR at 1839 (line 62, column 18) on #<SB-SYS:FD-STREAM
;                                                                        for "file c:\\emacs-23.1\\site-lisp\\slime\\swank-sbcl.lisp"
;                                                                        {24564B89}>:
;     package "SB-POSIX" not found
;   ; compilation aborted after 0:00:00.045

;; 
;; Error while compiling c:\emacs-23.1\site-lisp\slime\swank-sbcl.lisp:
;;   COMPILE-FILE returned NIL.
;; Aborting.

So it's not finding some stuff it needs in my recompiled asdf. In order to resolve this I've done a complete uninstall and reinstall of SBCL. No joy. I've got nothing in my .sbclrc either.

Update: On viewing the asdf.lisp source code the missing functions are definitely in the file. The thing that's preventing them from compiling is I think the line:

#+(and sbcl sbcl-hooks-require)

My knowledge of lisp is currently not sufficient to compile the asdf file in the environment to trigger the above conditional compilation statement.

Answer 1

I've sorted the problem using the following steps:

1. Fire up sbcl from Windows start menu.

2. Run the following code to add the sbcl-hooks-require symbol to the feature list:

   (push :sbcl-hooks-require features)

3. Recompile asdf.lisp. In order to do this I needed to recompile asdf outside of the installed C:\Program files\Steel... directory as the UAC on Windows Vista will stop the fasl being written. For example:

   (compile-file "C:\foobar\asdf.lisp")

4. Copy the generated fasl back to C:\Program files\Steel... to overwrite the original fasl.

Update: The formatting on stackoverflow has knocked out some of the code bits. The code should be as follows:

(push :sbcl-hooks-require *features*)
(compile-file "C:\\foobar\\asdf.lisp")