[elephant-devel] Development tools

[Ian Eslick]

I've used SVN a fair bit although I find managing branches in SVN to be
quite annoying.  I prefer darcs, actually, but am happy to use
Subversion - any other elephant users want to chime in on this?

Here's a set of Trac issues for UCW for example. 
http://trac.common-lisp.net/ucw/report/1 

There's also a WIKI to keep the TODO file and DESIGN file contents live
instead of hiding in the source tree.  I'm all for switching to Trac
sooner rather than later.

Google has also put together a nice environment for hosting, but I think
common-lisp.net is where folks go looking for lisp code.  0.6.1 is
probably a few weeks away (although with x86 mac & parallels I can test
all the lisp+os variations locally now; that should speed up the
debugging cycle as I can reproduce anything except 64-bit problems
locally - I think Marco and I resolved that)

Unicode:

By the way, I'm just cleaning up the last of my unicode updates.  I kept
having problems with the efficiency hacks in the current support for
Unicode -- there was no canonical representation of strings in the
database; each lisp+machine coded it differently.  Also, even though
most strings have codes in the ASCII or Latin-1 character set, SBCL was
still storing 32-bit characters.  It now uses the smallest coding size
(8,16 or 32) necessary to represent the string.  Support for 8 or 16 is
fairly efficient but if you use unicode code pages > 0 there will be a
performance and storage hit.  I put in a convention in where all 16/32
bit unicode strings are stored little-endian (x86 is a little-endian
machine) so I can use native string reader functions to pull shorts and
ints out of the byte vectors when possible.  This should greatly compact
string storage on most unicode supporting systems (2x on allegro, 4x on
SBCL).

More string efficiency hacks coming your way soon...

Cheers,
Ian

Robert L. Read wrote:
> Yes.
>
> I think we should probably do this.  I am not experienced with
> subversion, and know nothing
> about Trac, but using a mailing list for everything is a concept we
> need to outgrow.
>
>
> On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 07:59 +0100, Pierre THIERRY wrote:
>> If I ain't mistaken, currently Elephant only has a CVS, and no bug
>> tracker of any sort.
>>
>> Before or after 0.6.1, could you consider switching to subversion and
>> trac, as they are provided by common-list.net? It could help possible
>> contributors to see what remains to be done (comments and attached
>> patches to issues, assignments, etc.).
>>
>> Curiously,
>> Nowhere man
>> _______________________________________________
>> elephant-devel site list
>> elephant-devel at common-lisp.net <mailto:elephant-devel at common-lisp.net>
>> http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/elephant-devel
>>     
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