In this comment, I am a common-lisp noob, no competency at all. I have used and written a lot of sw in a lot of languages over 40 years though.
Keeping in mind the concepts of per-user and per-project installations, I have done the following experiments:
1) Quicklisp only. Not beating on Zach but we're getting close to a year
w/o updates, so something like cl-transducers needs to be installed from upstream.
Upshot is, other than the lack of updates, adding packages works perfectly. But I am curious how to delete a package. Installation is per-user, although stuffing packages into the asdf visible directories give some customization ability. (I think?)
2) The whole shebang: ros + ros-quicklisp + qlot. I spent a few weeks with this combo, digging around the code and installation structure, and... I have no idea how to manage this thing down the road. Seems to work, but there's a lot of assumptions about per-project vs per-user package installation. AFAICT, ros packaging means per-project quicklisp, which is fine, but no versioning. So then add qlot. Now we have versioning, which is great, but how do ros installed quicklisp packages interact with qlot? Especially since qlot add is a thing.
3) In order to simplify the system (ahem) I decided to follow the hints in the qlot installation section and simply install qlot with no quicklisp or ros on a clean system (ahem). I also reinstalled sly from clean and found out that I had to install sly-quicklisp in order for it to work. That was yesterday and I'm still scratching my head about what kind of a beast I am working with. What part is quicklisp and what part is qlot? I am also working a lot closer to asdf, experimenting at each step. Learning a lot, but, I'm not really getting a lot of happiness out of wading through at the source code level all these overlapping packaging systems (ahem). If I persevere I suspect I'll know a lot about the current state-of-the-art of lisp library packaging.
I am right now contemplating clearing the deck once again and doing the 2) ros + ros-quicklisp + qlot again, because it seem to work fairly smoothly and provides the opportunity for per-project versioning. I'll have to defer the understanding part into the future, though.