[elephant-devel] BDB stores don't work on my 32-bit Debian box either

[Leslie P. Polzer]

Sebastian Tennant wrote:
> Quoth "Leslie P. Polzer" <sky at viridian-project.de>:
>>> Would an elephant developer please help.  (I'm assuming you're not a developer
>>> Leslie). I really want to start actually using elephant!!!.
>
>> I guess you could say there are two somewhat active Elephant developers right
>> now, and I'm one of them.
>
> I'm sorry Leslie.  It's just that you're not listed under 'Authors' at:
>
>  http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/about.html
>
> Ian (Eslick) is.

I don't know much about this. My guess is that this page only lists
authors that have committed a chunk big enough to be relevant in
copyright matters.

I've contributed a substantial number of fixes and help people when
they face problems but I don't have the time to develop new features.


>> Ian and me are using it every day in GNU/Linux environments..
>
> Two isn't many :)

Well there are more but I don't know what use they make of Elephant
so I haven't mentioned them.


> Understood, however my two systems (clbuild/64-bit/SBCL/MacOSX and
> clbuild/32-bit/SBCL/Debian Lenny) are pretty common platforms are they not?

It's well known that Snow Leopard breaks a huge lot of MacPorts stuff,
unfortunately (you can tell from that I'm not even a Mac user to begin
with).

I agree that the second platform you've mentioned is pretty common but
my statement was to be understood in a general case. I.e. we have to
tend to a lot of software combinations -- this doesn't necessarily
mean that it will automatically work on every one of those even
if it's a common one.


> What's more, it's not obscure corner/edge cases which are causing me problems -
> I haven't been able to get elephant working sufficiently well to even begin
> evaluating it for my needs.

In general:

Elephant does funky things like building a shared library in its build process,
stressing the MOP heavily and using UFFI internals that don't cope well with the
UFFI emulation of CFFI.

It doesn't help of course that clbuild hasn't agreed to provide the real UFFI
for Elephant so far.


> Anyway, moaning is pointless.  Action is what's needed.  A few prominent
> notices on the elephant's website would have saved me hours, if not days.

Thanks for being constructive. I agree that the next objective should be
avoiding that new users fall into the same traps over and over.

I already guessed that you were just pretty exhausted and disappointed
after hours of struggling so I didn't really resent your complaints.

Sorry that it didn't work well for you right away.


>  1) If you use clbuild - edit wnpp-projects so that elephant-1.0 is pulled from
>     darcs.
>  2) Install UFFI (available from URL) and ensure that the 'real' uffi.asd is
>     found by ASDF first.
>  3) If you want to use a BerkeleyDB store, disregard the manual and install
>     Berkeley DB version 4.7 (from URL).  Better still, update the manual.
>  4) If you have a 64-bit machine make sure you compile a 64-bit BerkeleyDB.
>     Elephant will expect it. Include instructions for said compilation.

So does it work for you now or do you still face that obscure problem
with bdb-constants.lisp which looks like that file was truncated on your
installation?


> There are probably other things too, but I can't think of them at the moment.
> I'm happy to do these things myself.  I'll post a patched elephant.texinfo
> here, but what about the rest of the above notices?  Where do you think they
> should go?  In a README, or on the website perhaps?

This seems to be the right place as it's referenced from "Downloads":

  http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/doc/Installation.html#Installation

 Leslie