[elephant-devel] 0.60 tarball missing

[Ian Eslick]

I tend to agree with Henrik for my own part.  Despite the maturity of  
some of the lisp libraries, I have found myself needing to patch or  
tweak many of them at one point or another.  Moreoever, if you asdf- 
install a version, find a problem, report it, then you can't receive  
a fix until another asdf-install version is released.

Our release cycle, at least, is quite long.  It is very inconvenient  
then to post patches that have to be manually applied.

I just took a peek at Mercurial - it's basically Darcs written in  
Python although with some C extensions.  Not sure I like adding yet  
another source control to the Lisp ecosystem (CVS, SVN, Darcs, etc).   
An ideal solution would be cl-darcs, but it's not quite mature enough  
yet nor are there people other than the author using/supporting it.

I'm tempted to just use SVN for the next while, until there is a  
proper cross-platform, distributed source control available (perhaps  
when Darcs works better on Windows).

Ian


On Mar 29, 2007, at 11:32 PM, Henrik Hjelte wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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