I'm still working on sbcl-0.7.0 after three months, aka "on the order of a month".

"To foil the maintenance programmer, you have to understand how he thinks."

If you define two similar and closely coupled but different classes named DEBUG-FUNCTION in two different packages, you're off to a solid if unimaginative start. Don't neglect the basics just because they seem pedestrian.

Now, set up two independent ways to associate the debug names of functions with the function objects themselves. CL:DESCRIBE and CL:FUNCTION-LAMBDA-EXPRESSION look up names in the slot of the function object itself, but BACKTRACE and other logic in the debugger looks up names by finding the function's DEBUG-FUNCTION object and looking up the name in a slot in that DEBUG-FUNCTION object. (Actually the debugger looks up the function's DI::DEBUG-FUNCTION object, then looks at a slot in that object to find the C::DEBUG-FUNCTION object, then looks up the name there, as per the name confusion described in the previous paragraph.)

So far, the two systems look redundant (as in "violation of once and only once", not as in "reliable because one can carry on when the other fails"). That's good, you've caused quite a bit of friction and confusion already, especially when you hard-code a lot of the lookups by cut and paste programming instead of running through common functions defined for the purpose. But you shouldn't let up while you've got the maintenance programmer off by balance, by letting the two redundant systems be independent. This is your chance to deliver a mighty blow for chaos by coupling them in a bizarre, fragile, critical, poorly- or un-documented way. Why not store the C::DEBUG-FUNCTION objects in a per-COMPONENT list (where there are in general multiple functions per COMPONENT, and they're lumped together in the COMPONENT for purposes of block compilation and GC and stuff like that) then decide which DEBUG-FUNCTION of the list corresponds to which function object by testing for equality of the per-function-object name value with the per-DEBUG-FUNCTION name value? Wouldn't that be cool?