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

[Ian Eslick]

I'll look at this over the weekend.  I was slightly unhappy with the
build process, but never enough to do anything about it so thanks for
taking the initiative!

There is some issues with the tests assuming that objects under test
don't exist - after the test they exist so that assumption is broken. 
So as Robert says the tests are not idempotent.  I thought I had caught
all those issues for 0.6.0, but I can't guarantee that it's not
happening again in the current CVS HEAD. 

Cheers,
Ian

Robert L. Read wrote:
> Thank you!
>
> I'll talk to Ian about dealing with this patch; it certainly is nice
> to improve the installation process.
> Makefile is hardly offensive, but your point about smoothing the
> library placement is well taken.
>
> Yes, I seem to recall (it's been a while since I did this specifically
> for BDB) that the tests are
> not completely idempotent (runnable one after another.)  The fact that
> they fail should make you
> doubt the quality of our testing procedure, but not the core
> functionality of Elephant itself; if your
> test are green once, you have a good install, and any remaining bugs
> must be considered bug
> in the product itself.
>
> On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 08:47 +0000, pinterface wrote:
>> 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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