[elephant-devel] 0.60 tarball missing

[Henrik Hjelte]

On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 22:46 -0400, Ian Eslick wrote:

> The problem is asdf-install invoking a default behavior that does the  
> wrong thing with elephant.  I guess no one has tried to load elephant  
> 0.6.0 via asdf-install before.
> 
> And actually it really doesn't make much sense to bother loading the  
> asdf file after the install since it won't work until you've read  
> INSTALL and properly setup the external dependencies...sigh.
> 
> The problem is that asdf-install symlinks and loads all .asd files in  
> the root directory after the install.  Since we use subsidiary .asd  
> files, this behavior doesn't work out very well.
> I think in the next release we could fix this by merging all the .asd  
> files into one big one, but then I think you can't call load-op on  
> ele-bdb, ele-clsql or ele-acache, etc.  Does anyone know off the top  
> of their head how CL-SQL manages this?  I can look into it later if  
> no one knows the answer without looking into it.
> 
> Anyway, I'm open for suggestions.
I have a suggestion: drop asdf-install. Since elephant will need
tweaking, installing berkley DB or configuring a database, asdf-install
will not work out of the box for years. 

Instead moving to a distributed version control system is the way to go,
combined with a stable branch and tagging for versions. That way it is
much easier to get people to collaborate on the project. And maybe
zipfiles/tarballs, but not asdf-install.

I personally think asdf-install as it is now is not a great idea. I
seldom use it anymore. If you use a library there is a big chance you
may want to tweak it some day, and then you are better of with a
distributed version control system. Some patches you might want to send
in, some are best kept as your own changes. And asdf-installable
libraries don't have the _darcs folder included, so it make things more
difficult. 

Just my two cents,
Henrik Hjelte