[postmodern-devel] postmodern, pg, cl-rdbms

[Marijn Haverbeke]

Hello Attila,

I was aware of PG when I wrote Postmodern -- but as you say, its code is not
in a very good state so I opted to re-write it. I didn't find out about
cl-rdbms until very recently, and since it seemed in a rather expermental
and undocumented state I didn't pay too much heed to it.

The part of Postmodern that does SQL-as-s-expressions is something that I
wrote half a year ago and has been in use at the place where I work for a
while now, so I chose to stick with that instead of similar existing
project. There's also a factor of 'it is more fun to write something myself
than it is to bend existing existing into the shape I need' involved here,
so I (intentionally) did not always make the most 'cost-effective' choices.

I checked out local-time (writing a date/time library was something I'd
rather have avoided), but it did not seem to provide the necessary data
types for representing the various SQL types, and it is Unix-only at the
moment (uses the unix timezone files), and I want to be more portable than
that. -- Of course, optional, unportable support for timezones is better
than no support for them at all, so maybe we could add something like that.

Though I haven't found any real clean way to model optional dependencies in
ASDF yet -- see the hideous #.-hacks in the asd files for cl-postgres and
postmodern. I know there are ASDF extensions for things like that, but
nobody uses them so it's rather inconvenient to require them.

Trivial sockets... I know (you've told me multiple times on IRC), but until
usocket has proper and portable support for byte streams this seems the only
alternative (I'll switch to usocket at the drop of a hat when it gets byte
streams).

Anyway, thanks for the reactions, I'll look a bit further into cl-rdbms as
soon as I have the time, and we'll see if some kind of merging is in order.
But maybe you're better off just using the parts of Postmodern that you need
(cl-postgres) in that project? Or a branch of it, if you must... My
experiences with you in UCW context have kind of suggested that we've got a
bit of a different approach towards library building -- I'm something of a
minimalist, you like to throw in all kind of undeniably neat but very
experimental and expensive features ;)

Regards,
Marijn
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.common-lisp.net/pipermail/postmodern-devel/attachments/20061226/1e9b7f41/attachment.html>