[elephant-devel] Documentation / Backends

[Ian Eslick]

There will be a whole section in the manual (which is being rewritten  
as we speak) on how to write (or at least understand) a backend for  
Elephant.  I'm not sure this will be exhaustive, but should be a good  
guide to the landscape and make it much easier to get started.   
Henrik just finished writing a postgresql backend that didn't use  
CLSQL and without much guidance too, so there's a datapoint that you  
don't have to be an Elephant developer to do it.

FYI - I've been hacking on the skeleton of an all-lisp backend, but  
would welcome collaboration or even taking a back seat if someone  
else was motivated to write one.

Also, the new manual will be available online in texinfo-tree form, a  
single HTML file and in PDF.  I'm happy to take your suggestion and  
supply a pre-build version of all these files in the distribution and  
source control.  The lack of that has bugged me in the past as well.   
As part of the manual rewrite, I've been cleaning up the build  
process and when I'm done it should work if you have texinfo, tex and  
sbcl installed on your system.  There is also a manual procedure to  
do this in other lisps that I will document in the Install section of  
the new manual.

Ian


On Mar 24, 2007, at 11:58 AM, Edi Weitz wrote:

> Two more things:
>
> 1. Analogous to distributing pre-compiled DLLs with Elephant I'd also
>    recommend to include pre-built HTML and/or PDF documentation
>    (again, like CLSQL does).  Windows users usually won't have the
>    tools installed to build the docs, and even on Linux it didn't
>    really work for me, because a) the Lisp "lisp" (which on my machine
>    is CMUCL) is hard-coded into the Makefile, and b) make-ref.lisp
>    uses REQUIRE to load Elephant.
>
> 2. Is there a description somewhere on how to create a new backend for
>    Elephant?  (Like, which functions have to be provided and to
>    integrate it.)
>
> Thanks,
> Edi.
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