UPDATE: the CDR proposal corresponding to this blog is now finalized. It can be referred to as CDR #9.

In my ELS 2011 lightning talk, I announced the development of a new Common Lisp library called XFormat, which provides extensible format strings. A first release of this library is imminent. In this talk, I also mentionned the need for what I called "file-local variables". A file-local variable is a user-defined special variable that would behave as *PACKAGE* and *READTABLE* with respect to *LOAD* and *COMPILE-FILE*.

I have just created and released a very small library called ASDF-FLV which provides file-local variables through ASDF. In an ideal world, this library would become obsolete because file-local variables are so simple to implement that they should rather be done as an extension to the Common Lisp Standard, and provided by every Lisp vendor. That is the purpose of a new CDR proposal that I also just published on the discussion mailing list. This proposal is attached below for reference (update: it is now the final version).