If you want to deploy a common lisp package using quicklisp libraries, chances are your only option is to compile it with buildapp and deploy the binary. This has several drawbacks:

The generated binaries are huge. Minimum 15MB.

You need a machine with the same processor architecture to compile.

However, quicklisp is really the place where all the Common Lisp libraries are. But quicklisp is unfortunately not suitable to global installations, since the quicklisp folder is per-user.

To fix this, I have generated a debian package for every quicklisp system available. The project that generates the debian packages is available here, if you want to do it yourself: qldeb. (It depends on deb-packager.)

Every package will dump the library’s source code in /usr/share/common-lisp/source/ , which is loadable by asdf if you have common-lisp-controller installed on debian.

Another issue that I had: hosting.

I host my personal debian repository for some custom packages, but it’s just not convenient for something that can see some real usage.

The people at packagecloud.io have been very kind to provide me free hosting for this repository.

Thanks to their machinery, all you need to download Common Lisp libraries is this:

# apt-get install -y debian-archive-keyring apt-transport-https # cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/packagecloud-quicklisp.list <<EOF deb https://packagecloud.io/quicklisp/quicklisp/debian/ jessie main deb-src https://packagecloud.io/quicklisp/quicklisp/debian/ jessie main EOF # curl https://packagecloud.io/gpg.key | apt-key add - # apt-get update

And then, you can simply run e.g. apt-get install cl-alexandria to globally install alexandria .

Several notes:

Every package is prefixed with cl-

To respect quicklisp’s idea of a distribution, all the package dependencies require the same quicklisp version.

You can quickly find out the quicklisp version in the package’s version.

And with this, hack and glory awaits!