i have a patched version of asdf 1.369 which was maintained by gary king, with contributions from luminaries like nikodemus, chrodes, weitz, pvaneynd and kevin rosenburg. i've patched it to support the recent extensions that people seem to like (extra parameters to defsystem, like author). you can drop it into your implementation and quicklisp and it just works. asdf 2, asdf 3 happened since, they solve some kind of problems, i guess whatever google needed to do with its fleet, or maybe it's "easier to maintain", but it's not the kind of problems that surface in like 60% of quicklisp packages.