[elephant-devel] config.lisp patch; backend-tests question

[pinterface]

Howdy all!

I'm new to elephant (just installed and compiled it over the weekend), and a
couple parts of the installation process struck me as being particularly
unlispy:
* a Makefile (and needing to modify it)
* editing config.lisp

Attached is a fairly simple patch to allow something like
  ;; set to the location of the ubuntu BDB-4.4 package
  (setf elephant:*sleepycat-foreign-library-path* "/usr/lib/libdb-4.4.so")
  (asdf:operate 'asdf:load-op :ele-bdb)
to work, rather than requiring direct modification of config.lisp, which is
prone to having issues with cvs update.

I'd like to eliminate the makefile entirely and have ASDF handle the
compilation of C files itself, rather than running through make; that way,
.so files will end up in the correct locations under systems such as
asdf-binary-locations (osicat does this, and it's quite handy not having to
shuffle .so files around myself, which I tend to forget). That'll be a bit
more involved and require delving into ASDF a good deal farther than I've
been before, so we'll see how long it takes me to figure out. (Assuming such
a patch would even be welcome, of course.) Anyway...

After some minor confusion caused by backend tests only succeeding once[1],
I appear to have a usable installation and am looking forward to playing
with it more in depth.

[1] Are the BDB backend tests expected to fail the second time when run
multiple times?
  i.e., (progn (do-backend-tests)  ; pass
               (do-backend-tests)) ; fail
I figure by the existence of delscript.sh it's normal behavior (or at least
not worryingly abnormal), but not seeing it mentioned in any docs thought
I'd check, just to be sure.

That about covers it for now, I think.

-pix

Relevant system specs, for reference:
* SBCL (from CVS)
* Elephant (from CVS)
* UFFI (latest version)
* asdf-binary-locations (from darcs repo)
* BerkeleyDB-4.4 (Ubuntu universe package)
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