[elephant-devel] Volunteers needed for testing in preparation of releasing 0.6.0

[Robert L. Read]

Dear Team,
    Ian Eslick has now finished the alpha-candidate release of 0.6.0.
This contains a
very significant feature enhancement: the automatic indexing of slots in
persistent classes.
The associated API is very powerful.  Like many things in computer
programming, this 
doesn't let you do much you could not do before; but it makes it very,
very convenient.  This
feature make 0.6.0 even easier to use for many applications, and even
easier to prototype
with.  Moreover, Ian rewrote the internal structure, making it clearer
and cleaner, although
that should only be of interest to Elephant developers.
    Additionally, I have added a package called Data Collection
Management (DCM) to the new
"contrib" directory.  This package is a layer on top of Elephant that is
particularly convenient
if you prefer create-read-update-delete semantics and like the idea of
being able to choose
the storage style as a strategy pattern.  DCM has only sporadic internal
documentation, but
it has some test cases.
    Additionally, Ian has put a lot of time into making sure that one
can upgrade from a 0.5.0
database to a 0.6.0 database smoothly.   This is part of our attempt to
mature Elephant,
and to demonstrate that it is ready for serious applications and that in
the future we will
always provide a migration path to the latest release version.  As you
can imagine, this piece
of functionality is somewhat harder to test than the main product.
Before anyone attempts to 
upgrade a data store that they care about, they must remember to follow
the standard procedure
of first BACKING UP their data before upgrading, even though the upgrade
process is not 
destructive.
    Upgrading the version of a repository is accomplished by migrating
the data from an old (0.5.0)
repository to a new repository.  It is internally documented in the file
"migrate.lisp".  I have written
some user-documentation about the other features of 0.6.0 but not the
upgrade path.
    As you know, one of the great things that Ben Lee and Andrew
Blumberg initiated and has
been continuously strengthened is the extensive automated test suite
containing more than 
100 tests.  
    The 0.5.0 release was tested and all-green under ACL, OpenMCL, and
SBCL, on the 
BerkeleyDB backend and the SQLLite and Postgres SQL-based.  Ideally,
before giving
0.6.0 a formal release we would complete this matrix:

LISP                        ACL                        OpenMCL
SBCL
Backend                   
BerekeleyDB            Tests?/Upgrade?    Tests?/Upgrade?
Tests?/Upgrade?
Postgres                   Tests?/Upgrade?    Tests?/Upgrade?
Tests?/Upgrade?
SQLLite                    Tests?/Upgrade?    Tests?/Upgrade?
Tests?/Upgrade?

(Elephant is probably easily portable to other LISPs and easily supports
other SQLs, but 
that issue is separate from release 0.6.0).
    I therefore ask for volunteers to perform the test suites and test
upgrade migration on these
LISP/backend combinations.  (We may not get all of these combinations
tested.)
    I have tagged the CVS repository ELEPHANT-0-6-0-rc2, as a reference
point in case bugs are 
found.  If you get the head of the  CVS repository now (see
http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/ for
instructions), that is what you will get.  Ian has agreed to be more or
less on call to deal with bugs that are found,
and I will be actively managing things and assisting Ian.
    If this release is successful, I think I will put some energy into
publicizing the project; it will be too useful
not to be widely used.  Thanks.


----
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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