I clicked on it, read some of the docs, and thought "cool, this will make it easier for me to use S3 in my CL code". It looks like seriously good stuff, and having written CL-SQS I know it isn't obvious.

And then I remembered that I'm learning Clojure and in Clojure I can just load an existing Java library and use it :-)

CL-SQS looks cool. If you're using Drakma, you're already pulling in one or more portable string-to-octets conversion routine (via flexi-streams or babel), so there's no real need to use SBCL- or AllegroCL-specific routines.

Maybe it's just me, but every time I see a new common lisp library and I try and get ASDF to give it to me, at least 3 dependencies are inexplicably broken and refuse to work.

I was excited about this, but a fresh install of SBCL on Mac OS X 10.5 simply couldn't complete.

Sorry to hear that. As a test, I just did a from-scratch ASDF-Install of ZS3 (Drakma has updated since the last ZS3 release) and everything just worked. I'm using Linux.

What broke for you? Maybe it's something I can help fix.

That's weird. I just pulled it down and built it fine on MacOS X 10.5 on SBCL as well. An error message would help me figure out why it works for me but not you.

The tutorial that the article points to is a good beginner's survey on meta-stuff that every project should at least consider before ignoring.

As far as ASDF goes, the downloads and dependencies don't give me any problems, it is the loading after install. I keep having to construct sym-links by hand!?