[elephant-devel] A thorny problem....

[Klaus Harbo]

On 18/02/2006, at 19:29, Ian Eslick wrote:

> Klaus,
>
> We should talk offline.  I'm in the middle of a large re- 
> organization of
> the codebase and am trying to simplify alot of the backend
> functionality.  Merging your changes into mine will be non-trivial.
>
> If most of your changes are limited to berkeley-db and sleepycat  
> then it
> shouldn't be hard to make the changes there by hand.  The metaclass
> protocol should get fixed by migrating to closer-to-mop in the near
> future which deals with most of the mopish problems that are  
> patched in
> the current metaclasses.lisp file.
>
> Anyway, why don't you fill me in on what you're doing so we can
> coordinate and keep the pain under control.  :)
>
> Ian

Well, I think the best way to characterize what I've been doing is to  
'hack' Elephant to make it work with LW, i.e. I wouldn't consider  
what I've done 'changes to Elephant'.  My main aim has been to  
understand the kinds of changes that would be required to make it  
work -- with that understanding I would then look at what would be  
the best way to fold it into Elephant.

I'm encouraged that you're working on a reorganization; IMHO the code  
really needs it (I do not mean this as criticism -- considering the  
process Elephant has been through, lack organization is quite  
understandable).  If it is okay to venture an opinion, I think the  
code would benefit from stratifying both in terms of backends (which  
I believe is already happening judging from recent postings to the  
list), and in terms of CL implementations.  The latter could perhaps  
be approached like in Portable AllegroServe, where there's a clear  
interface to certain functionality, a separate files implement this  
interface for different implementations?

As I mentioned, I don't have persistent classes working, and -  
frankly - my meta-programming skills are not very advanced; yet!   
Poring over the code, I wondered if using Pascal Costanza's Closer  
framework might help Elephant become highly portable across  
implementations?  I know that, all things being equal, it is better  
to rely on fewer libraries rather than more, but I think there's  
considerable risk that we'll be reinventing the wheel... (I should  
perhaps add that I have not actually used Closer, but I have great  
respect for Pascal's abilities so I would expect it to be relatively  
usable.)

-Klaus

- The pencil is mightier than the pen -