[elephant-devel] Cached slots and other tweaks for 1.0

[Ian Eslick]

Cached slots:
-------------

- Currently cached slots are not rolled back to their initial value if  
transaction aborts.  I can add a facility to push the cached value on  
the initial read into a per-transaction list that can be used to reset  
the cached slots on an abort.   Should this be by default or an  
exception?  A global variable or a reader macro?

- Currently there is no way to 'refresh' the instance to get data from  
the db or to force reads to go to the db instead of the cached value.   
Any suggestions on a model & interface for doing this?


asdf-install:
-------------

- What would be required to make elephant asdf-installable.  There are  
several problems.

1) asdf-install's propensity to load all .asd files in the root  
directory.
2) the dependence on external libraries that are not asdf-installable.
3) the dependence on a C compiler for memutils.
4) the my-config.sexp file is not created by default, should we add an  
option to
    auto-create it either as a restart option or just by warning that  
one was created?

Anything else?

Would anyone like to volunteer to work on making elephant asdf- 
installable?


Tracking bugs:
---------------

As I said earlier, bug reports should be entered into Trac.  I am  
going to be batching up my work on Elephant, so will not be able to  
get to bugs quickly and need help remembering the current status.  As  
a community, this is a discipline I think we need to develop,  
particularly if we want to be back-patching 1.0 while continuing to  
work on 1.1 and beyond.

Thank you,
Ian