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

[Sebastian Tennant]

Quoth "Leslie P. Polzer" <sky at viridian-project.de>:
> 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.

Yes, I'm sure you're right.

> 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.

Well, as far as I'm concerned, you definitely deserve a mention.  Perhaps there
should be 'Contributors' section, or a 'Maintainers - Past & Present' section,
or both.

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

Fair enough.

> 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 was thinking of installing the Snow Leopard update but didn't get around to
it, and thank goodness I didn't!  My machine is an ordinary yellow and black
spotted Leopard.

> 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.

Absolutely.

> 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.

I thought CFFI emulated (or improved upon) UFFI somehow, not the other way
around.  [To be honest, I don't know the first thing about all this].

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

Yes, this is another big stumbling block that really needs to be resolved.  My
cross-posted article to the CFFI list prompted Luís to reassert his willingness
to change the name of CFFI's uffi.asd once he received the necessary patches.
In his own words:

 "Patches for CFFI and, most importantly, clbuild are very much welcome. :-)"

The first thing I thought when I read this was:

 "Isn't Luís the author of CFFI?"

Anyway, it seems pretty clear to me that a coordinated joint effort is really
what's called for, involving at least one person from each interested party;
cffi, uffi, elephant, clbuild, and more.

What do you think?

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

Agreed.

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

You guessed right. :)

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

It's not your fault Lelie, and there's therefore no need for you to apologise.
We'll get it working eventually and improve its usability in the process.

>>  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?

Yes, I'm afraid I am.  The first time I try to call 'open-store', which cause
sbcl to hang, it is in the middle of doing some further compilation that begins
when the call to 'open-store' is evaluated.  The second time I try to call
'open-store' I get the truncated file error.  I've no doubt the file is
trunctaed because of the previous hang, i.e., the hang is the real error.

> This seems to be the right place as it's referenced from "Downloads":
>
>   http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/doc/Installation.html#Installation

Presumably I'll need a common-lisp.net account in order to edit the HTML
source?  Shall I write and request one?

Seb
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