[elephant-devel] Ditching Darcs --- and other plans

[Robert L. Read]

On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 09:11 +0200, Leslie P. Polzer wrote:

> The only major problem with it is that the Postmodern backend
> hasn't kept up with the schema evolution changes.

I did a bunch of work back in the spring to bring postmodern up-to-date,
and there were just a few failing tests at that time---I'm not sure what
else has happened.

> 
> There were still some deca of failing tests when I last tried
> it.
> 
> Maybe it makes sense to have two releases: 091.1 for all
> who wish to use Postmodern (a snapshot of the current stable)
> and 092 for all who are content with CLSQL or BDB.
> 
> 
> > It's fair to say that I'm not providing much leadership this year, so
> > the y'all and Ian will have to do it.
> 
> What are your plans for the future, Robert?

Well, Ian has been the de facto leader for the last year or more.  I'm
happy to resign as the official maintain in favor of him, or whomever he
appoints.

One of the problems that I've had is that Ian has taken things in a
different direction than I would have.  I of course did not and do not
criticize this, because, after all, he was doing most of the work, and I
mainly kept it working with CL-SQL, and helped some with the postmodern
stuff.

Basically, I think Ian's "defpclass" stuff is great, and a great
improvement over my bare-bones DCM approach.  The additions of
"associations" I find a lot more dubious.  The schema evolution stuff
that Ian spearheaded is the seed of something really great and unique
(in ANY persistence solution), but until it is more complete, in ways
that I think I have written about here, it doesn't really provide a
sufficiently compelling schema evolution management system for people to
want to switch from Hibernate clones to Elephant.

I am currently working on developing another LISP project, a "natural
diff."  I hope to create a common-lisp project around it soon.  At the
moment this seems more compelling for me personally to be working on
than Elephant.

Personally, I would like to implement a native-LISP Btree basis for
Elephant, and I would like to build on Ian's schema versioning to make
what I personally envision as a really game-changing schema evolution
system.  However, both of these are relatively low priorities to me.

Since I ran out of money for the business I was building that required
Elephant and have been forced to take a 40-hour a week job that takes
60-hours a week, I have been fairly useless to this project, although I
remain an enthusiastic fan of its potential.  When my financial
situation changes, I will be an active user again, and, in whatever form
y'all find helpful, a contributor.