fosskers/vend

You may already know of these, but for others curious: I'm also not a huge fan of quicklisp, though bundles[0] made it a little more bearable for me. You may also consider vend[1], ocicl[2] (heavily AI-assisted recently), or qlot[3]. [0] https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/bundles.html [1] https://github.com/fosskers/vend [2] https://github.com/ocicl/ocicl [3] https://github.com/fukamachi/qlot For macroexpansion, SLIME and SLY have macrostep functionality that lets you expand macros in place, which has helped me immensely on more than one occasion, though you can also manually expand with macroexpand.

You can achieve roughly the same by writing down the SHA256 hash the first time you download and then comparing when you download the next time. But, yeah, while I do not like submodules, for vendoring stuff it seems a reasonable approach. There's also https://github.com/fosskers/vend if you lean that way.

You can pin dependencies with Qlot or Ocicl (or vendor them with vend), but it might be a long time before you actually need this (the ecosystem is pretty darn stable). https://github.com/fukamachi/qlot/ https://github.com/ocicl/ocicl/ https://github.com/fosskers/vend/ (new)