[rucksack-devel] tests

[Cyrus Harmon]

On Jan 12, 2007, at 12:49 PM, Arthur Lemmens wrote:

> Attila Lendvai wrote:
>
>> i'm planning to implement some new features in the 5am testsuite and
>> i'm also planning to play with rucksack. so it came as a natural idea
>> to test-drive the new 5am features by converting/extending the
>> rucksack test-suite. (optionally loadable rucksack-test system,
>> asdf:test-op, etc)
>>
>> i wonder if you like this idea?
>>
>> or the idea of using bordeaux-threads (for the crossplatform locking
>> primitives)?
>>
>> or depending on alexandria and anaphora for useful common utils?
>>
>> i can voulenteer to do these if you are not against them.
>
> I'm against all of them, to tell you the truth.  I try to avoid
> dependencies on other libraries for Rucksack, unless such libraries
> have very big and obvious advantages over the way that things are
> currently done.

While I share Arthur's aversion to unnecessary package dependency  
creep, if using 5am enables someone like Attila to develop a nice  
test suite for rucksack, I'm all for it. It doesn't have to 1) be the  
canonical test suite or 2) live in the rucksack distribution, but if  
it exercises the system and points in the right direction to make  
improvements, that's a good thing in my book.

(just as an aside I'm not a fan of anaphoric macros and would be non- 
plussed if the code were gratuitously changed to this style.)

Locking is a big deal, but it's not clear to me that bx-threads buys  
us much. Thinking about a general strategy for concurrent access to  
rucksacks would seem to be a better place to start.

One area in which other dependencies could be interesting to explore  
are not so much in the core rucksack, but rather as extensions to  
rucksack. In particular, I'm thinking of indexing. The current  
indexing strategy appears to be limited to b-trees. It would be  
interesting to consider how to do extensible a la GiST and to use  
things like spatial-trees for indexing of spatial data in rucksacks,  
for example.

This isn't to say that i want spatial trees to be a requirement for  
rucksack, but rather that if there were a way for users/developers to  
make new index types, that could be interesting.

Cyrus