[elephant-devel] BDB problems and a proper FAQ

[Sebastian Tennant]

Hi Ian,

Sorry for the late reply.  I have a rather annoying cold at the moment.

Quoth Ian Eslick <eslick at media.mit.edu>:
> I'm ostensibly the primary developer on Elephant; the three prior primary
> developers have been inactive for years now.  Leslie has recently been kind
> enough to step up and help with user support and bug fixes and will certainly
> be recognized in the 1.0 manual when we're ready for a final release
> (updating the manual has been one of the gating tasks).  We all do our best
> to help and want Elephant to be as robust as possible.  I in particular have
> been lousy at responding recently, but there are of course good reasons for
> that.

I've no doubt there are.  Glad to hear that Leslie will be getting a mention in
the 1.0 manual.  He's been very patient with me!!!

> Anyway, I'm sorry to hear that your experience has been so frustrating.
> Unfortunately, the 64-bit lisp + OS + BDB combinations have made things much
> more difficult than they once were.  As an aside, Franz AllegroCache has most
> of the features of Elephant and has a great and responsive support staff.  If
> you are frustrated with the state of free, volunteer-developed lisp libraries
> it is possible to pay to get more reliability and better support!

Noted.

> There are dozens of users of Elephant, some casual and some serious.  Some
> are working on older versions of the library as their deployed systems are
> stable and not actively developed so not everyone is subject to problems with
> the current release.  

Naturally.

> Leslie and I are just the most vocal on this list.

Understood.

> I'm running Elephant under ClozureCL these days and it works fine under Snow
> Leopard as well as Debian.

Noted.

> What's your current status, are you still stuck with the 'invalid argument'
> problems?

Yeah, I'm afraid so (on my Mac).  I've got an elephant-1.0 bdb 4.7 store
working on a 32-bit Debian box with SBCL 1.0.30 but am having no luck with the
Mac, even with CCL.  I'll post a backtrace in a separate thread.

> I think that a FAQ on the home page would be a great way to keep track of the
> kind of issues that you have experienced.  Here is a first crack at it;
> please add your own experiences/observations and I'll post it on the home
> page.

You've covered pretty much everything.  Please find attached HTML (which I hope
is a help).

Regards,

Sebastian
-- 
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