[elephant-devel] New maintainer and new branch

[Robert L. Read]

I am now the new maintainer of the Elephant project.  

I don't know much about the history of what has been going on, so please
be patient with me and give me as much information as you can.

I have recently written a significant extension the original Elephant
project.
This allows one to use CL-SQL, and in particular PostGres, as a backend.
However, the BerkeleyDB system still works and in fact functions are 
provided to migrate data between multiple co-existing repositories,
whether
implemented with PostGres or BerkeleyDB.

The PostGres system is presently much slower.  However, some people
may prefer it to the BerkeleyDB system due to the BerkeleyDB license,
which does not allow you to build a public website unless your system is
all open-source.

The extention is checked into a branch of CVS called "SQL-BACK-END".

The easiest way to get it, and the extention of the documentation that 
I wrote, is to do an anonymous CVS checkout of the revision "SQL-BACK-
END":

cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous:anonymous at common-
lisp.net:/project/elephant/cvsroot co -r SQL-BACK-END elephant

By doing a "make" in the docs directory, you can construct the HTML
based documentation
that includes a new chapter on this extension.  Or you can read it on
the 
common-lisp Elephant site:
 http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/doc/SQL-back_002dend.html#SQL-
back_002dend

The file "src/RUNTEST.lisp" shows how to load and run the
implementation-specific tests,
as well as the migration tests.

I don't know how many people are using elephant, or what your desires
may be.
My basic plan is to wait until mid-November and if nobody has complained
enough,
to make the SQL-BACK-END version the main version to be released as
Elephant 0.3,
at which point a tar file will be available.

I am not an expert on BerkeleyDB but intend to maintain complete back
compatibility
with it.  This issue is discussed in the new documentation.

I intend to actively use this system.  I may not be actively developing
it, but here is 
my wish list:

1)  SQLite compatibility (estimate: 3 days?)
2)  Much more efficient encoding (estimate: 5 days?)

Please let me hear from you if you have any interest in this; I am
strongly motivated
to maintain software that people are using.


----
Robert L. Read, PhD                                     read &T
robertlread.net
Consider visiting Progressive Engineering:
http://robertlread.net/pe
In Austin: 912-8593                                        "Think
globally, Act locally." -- RBF
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