SBCL Error Messages: Any way to improve?
I think you're looking for: (sb-ext:restrict-compiler-policy 'debug 3)
You can put it into your ~/.sbclrc or into your REPL, and SBCL's debugger (especially in SLIME) will produce much more useful results.
This is a common problem with distributions that "customise" the build script; Arch Linux is a regular offender. Installing binaries from sbcl.org is the most reliable method. It's fairly easy to then build from source if one wants the latest and greatest.
One more thing I've learned recently, and this may be useful in your situation:
- Make sure to compile everything with sufficient debug level.
- Wrap the code you suspect into
(step ...)form. From there you can follow restarts, which you will recognize as being very similar to GDB and other step-debuggers (you can step-next, step-into, step-out and step-countinue) from there. It may be a bit tedious to get to the function you need, if you absolutely have no clue as to where it is coming from, but if you use it as a methodology, and test smaller pieces of code, it helps.
More info: http://www.sbcl.org/manual/#Single-Stepping