[elephant-devel] Some thoughts/Questions from testing

[Robert L. Read]

On Sun, 2008-05-11 at 19:50 -0400, Glenn Tarcea wrote:
> What do you all think about allowing two different versions of  
> Elephant to be installed at the same time? I tried to have both my  
> original version of Elephant installed and also to install elephant- 
> unstable. Currently there are a lot of dependencies on the system  
> name sprinkled throughout the code that prevent this. My thought  
> would be to allow someone to do a (require 'elephant-unstable) (or  
> some other chosen system name) and have it load an alternative  
> version of Elephant. All the package names would stay the same, just  
> the systems would be different.

I think this could be very nice for the reasons you mention.  I
personally don't know how to do it.  I suspect any workable solution
would have to be an asdf-based solution, not just using 'requre.

> 
> The benefit to this is it would allow users to test out the new  
> functionality before deciding to switch, and for testers, it would  
> mean we could have both versions installed. It seems like this would  
> be helpful right now when the BerkeleyDB interfaces have stabilized,  
> but the postmodern interface hasn't. For me it would allow me to test  
> and observe behavior in the old environment and then easily switch  
> over to the new environment.
> 
> If no one objects I can look into this further, at least drawing up a  
> plan of attack and posting it for comment.

I think it is definitely worth trying to figure out how to do it.
However, an added complication is that any objects created are created
under a certain version, which may not be readable by another version.
Ian has objectified this with his "schema numbering" for classes in
elephant-unstable.

The idea situation is that Elephant version N+K can read any Elephant
object written by version N.  I think we are moving toward that
capability.

However, even if one version can't read another version, being able to
have two distinct packages in one image could be useful---I encourage
you to spend some time thinking through how it might work.

> 
> Also, it looks like the testing framework is being migrated over to  
> 5am. I assume this means that I should write any new tests using 5am?

Yes --- I believe we are already completely dependent on 5am for
testing.

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Glenn
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