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Dear Team,<BR>
Ian Eslick has now finished the alpha-candidate release of 0.6.0. This contains a<BR>
very significant feature enhancement: the automatic indexing of slots in persistent classes.<BR>
The associated API is very powerful. Like many things in computer programming, this <BR>
doesn't let you do much you could not do before; but it makes it very, very convenient. This<BR>
feature make 0.6.0 even easier to use for many applications, and even easier to prototype<BR>
with. Moreover, Ian rewrote the internal structure, making it clearer and cleaner, although<BR>
that should only be of interest to Elephant developers.<BR>
Additionally, I have added a package called Data Collection Management (DCM) to the new<BR>
"contrib" directory. This package is a layer on top of Elephant that is particularly convenient<BR>
if you prefer create-read-update-delete semantics and like the idea of being able to choose<BR>
the storage style as a strategy pattern. DCM has only sporadic internal documentation, but<BR>
it has some test cases.<BR>
Additionally, Ian has put a lot of time into making sure that one can upgrade from a 0.5.0<BR>
database to a 0.6.0 database smoothly. This is part of our attempt to mature Elephant,<BR>
and to demonstrate that it is ready for serious applications and that in the future we will<BR>
always provide a migration path to the latest release version. As you can imagine, this piece<BR>
of functionality is somewhat harder to test than the main product. Before anyone attempts to <BR>
upgrade a data store that they care about, they must remember to follow the standard procedure<BR>
of first BACKING UP their data before upgrading, even though the upgrade process is not <BR>
destructive.<BR>
Upgrading the version of a repository is accomplished by migrating the data from an old (0.5.0)<BR>
repository to a new repository. It is internally documented in the file "migrate.lisp". I have written<BR>
some user-documentation about the other features of 0.6.0 but not the upgrade path.<BR>
As you know, one of the great things that Ben Lee and Andrew Blumberg initiated and has<BR>
been continuously strengthened is the extensive automated test suite containing more than <BR>
100 tests. <BR>
The 0.5.0 release was tested and all-green under ACL, OpenMCL, and SBCL, on the <BR>
BerkeleyDB backend and the SQLLite and Postgres SQL-based. Ideally, before giving<BR>
0.6.0 a formal release we would complete this matrix:<BR>
<BR>
LISP ACL OpenMCL SBCL<BR>
Backend <BR>
BerekeleyDB Tests?/Upgrade? Tests?/Upgrade? Tests?/Upgrade?<BR>
Postgres Tests?/Upgrade? Tests?/Upgrade? Tests?/Upgrade?<BR>
SQLLite Tests?/Upgrade? Tests?/Upgrade? Tests?/Upgrade?<BR>
<BR>
(Elephant is probably easily portable to other LISPs and easily supports other SQLs, but <BR>
that issue is separate from release 0.6.0).<BR>
I therefore ask for volunteers to perform the test suites and test upgrade migration on these<BR>
LISP/backend combinations. (We may not get all of these combinations tested.)<BR>
I have tagged the CVS repository ELEPHANT-0-6-0-rc2, as a reference point in case bugs are <BR>
found. If you get the head of the CVS repository now (see http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/ for<BR>
instructions), that is what you will get. Ian has agreed to be more or less on call to deal with bugs that are found,<BR>
and I will be actively managing things and assisting Ian.<BR>
If this release is successful, I think I will put some energy into publicizing the project; it will be too useful<BR>
not to be widely used. Thanks.<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
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----<BR>
Robert L. Read, PhD read &T robertlread.net<BR>
Consider visiting Progressive Engineering: http://robertlread.net/pe<BR>
In Austin: 912-8593 "Think globally, Act locally." -- RBF<BR>
<BR>
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