[elephant-devel] Third attempt to send message (attachments removed)

[Robert L. Read]

This is my third attempt to send this message.  I have removed the HTML
that I had included
and the attachments to see if a spam filter is blocking this or
something.  If this go through, I 
will attempt again to post the remainder of the message.



Dear Elephant Devel team,

    Here is my good-enough-to-be-released extension of elephant to use
CL-SQL as a back-end (with PostGres).

Below is the documentation that I wrote (It's in the texinfo, but I
thought you might like to read it directly, so I pasted it here.)
Please find attached a tar file containing all of the new files, and
additionally a file containing the cvs diff of the files that
already existed in the repository.

    If your interested in this, you should probably read the
documentation below.  The code change is so great that 
I doubt you can see much from the diff; the best way to really analyze
would be to create a separate branch in CVS and 
allow me to commit my stuff there, so that one can easily checkout the
whole branch.

    In a nutshell, I have extended Elephant to utilized CL-SQL (on top
of PostGres) as a back-end in addition to 
BerkeleyDB.  Some people may think this pointless; others may be pleased
with the more permissive licensing of 
PostGres, or see this as a step to supporting, for example, SQLite.
Addtionally, this version is a "mutli-repository" version
in that many repositories can be open at the same time, and data can be
migrated between them, without regard to 
the implementation strategy that underlies the repository.
    
    I commend the Elephant developers on the good set of tests they had;
I have expanded them to allow testing
on multiple repository types and to test migration.

    I know the current owners of Elephant are looking for a new owner.
That, and the fact that some people might
like Elephant the way it is and hate the apparent complexity that I have
added, or might really like what I have done,
creates a complicated set of questions we have to answer:

    1)  Who will own Elephant?
    2)  Should this be the next version of Elephant, or should it be a
fork (that is, a completely different project, maybe
"Bignose" or something)?
    
    I don't know how many people use Elephant or are on this list.  I
enjoyed it until I hit the BerkeleyDB licensing
restriction.  I definitely plan to use this work that I have done in a
website moving forward, and will be maintaining
it, one way or the other.
    
    I have not yet offered to own Elephant, since I am not an expert
LISP coder, have never managed a large open-source
project before, don't know who is using it, don't plan to pay for any
lisp system, and don't know how much time is 
involved in maintaining such a package, and am not an expert on
BerkeleyDB.  However, if nobody else has volunteered
and Ben can't do it, I suppose that I must be better than nothing at
all.

    Please express some sort of opinion.  I spent 5 solid weeks on this;
which in hindsight was probably a three-week 
waste of time compared to just implementing my own serializer, which
would have served my purpose.
However, now that it is presentable, I certainly hope that someone in
addition to myself will benefit from it.


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