This may be a niche issue, but I have been unable to to call (in-package) and expect the REPL to stay latched onto the package/image I want to evaluate and change at runtime.

In this case I'm speaking about swank running in a StumpWM instance. I can call (in-package :stumpwm) with conjure and I get a positive REPL response of #<PACKAGE "STUMPWM">. Subsequent evaluations of variables an functions that should be defined in the stump image are not.

However, buffer-local evaluations lead me to think that the CL-USER runtime is where the state ends up going, as re-defined variables and functions seem to persist.

I am able to get a working common lisp REPL running with Vlime, which works entirely. It may serve as a good point of reference.

Should I get better at this I will try to contribute. If anyone's able to reproduce this with other packages, I'd be curious to know