[elephant-devel] BDB problems and a proper FAQ

[Ian Eslick]

I've posted this FAQ documentation online.  -Ian

On Nov 19, 2009, at 11:10 AM, Sebastian Tennant wrote:

> 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
> -- 
> Emacs' AlsaPlayer - Music Without Jolts
> Lightweight, full-featured and mindful of your idyllic happiness.
> http://home.gna.org/eap
>
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