<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Hi All,</div><div><br></div><div>To address recent discussions.</div><div><br></div>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.<div><br></div><div>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!</div><div><div><br></div><div>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. Leslie and I are just the most vocal on this list. I'm running Elephant under ClozureCL these days and it works fine under Snow Leopard as well as Debian.</div><div><br></div><div>What's your current status, are you still stuck with the 'invalid argument' problems?</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>1) Documentation for 1.0 release</div><div><br></div><div>The documentation on the website is from the 0.9.1 release and may be incorrect in some details. The mailing list since 2008 and this FAQ should supersede anything in the documentation.</div><div><br></div><div>2) CLBUILD Compatability</div><div><br></div><div><div>Elephant does not work properly under the default cl-build configuration due to it's UFFI dependency. We have made attempts to port BDB to CFFI without success; there are subtle issues that lead to obscure bugs and the original FFI developer who wrote that code left the project in 2003 or 2004 and no one else has yet had the time and expertise to resolve them. The workaround, thanks to Sebastian Tennant, is:</div><div><br></div></div><div>a) Edit wnpp-projects so that elephant-1.0 is pulled from darcs.<br>b) Install UFFI (available from URL) and ensure that the 'real' uffi.asd is found by ASDF first.</div><div><br></div><div>3) Library and Lisp Dependencies</div><div><br></div><div>The most common active configurations of the 1.0 release branch is on SBCL/Linux/Postmodern+BDB and ClozureCL/MacOS/BDB. Elephant is known to work on those platforms when properly configured.</div><div><br></div><div>We track the latest version of BDB. The current 1.0 pre-release depends on BDB 4.7.</div><div><br></div><div>4) 64-bit Lisp and BDB</div><div><br></div><div>If you are running a 32-bit or 64-bit lisp, BDB will need to be built for the appropriate architecture. Due to this the default MacPorts, Debian packages or other pre-packaged distributions of BDB may fail for you. Building from source is the appropriate solution (thanks to Matthew Emerson for the script). Don't forget to update my-config.sexp to use "4.7" and point to the appropriate paths.</div><div><br></div><div>a. get bdb 4.7<br><br>Direct link; if it doesn't work use the index page:<br><a href="http://download.oracle.com/berkeley-db/db-4.7.25.tar.gz">http://download.oracle.com/berkeley-db/db-4.7.25.tar.gz</a><br><br>Index page:<br><a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/db/index.html">http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/db/index.html</a><br><br>b. unpack into /usr/local/src (or wherever)<br><br>Build docs are at<br><br><a href="file:///usr/local/src/db-4.7.25/docs/ref/build_unix/intro.html">file:///usr/local/src/db-4.7.25/docs/ref/build_unix/intro.html</a><br><br>(or wherever you put it)<br><br>c. cd to db-4.7.25/build_unix<br><br>d. use the following command line to configure, where $ is the shell prompt<br><br>$ CFLAGS="-arch x86_64" LDFLAGS="-arch x86_64" ../dist/configure<br></div><div><br></div><div>e. sudo make install</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></body></html>