[rucksack-devel] tests

[Arthur Lemmens]

Levente Mészáros wrote:

> Here is an simple export machinery for rucksack. It transforms the
> rucksack database into a lambda form which when called imports it into
> another rucksack. Some tests included.

Thanks, interesting.

The most important reason I see for an import/export facility is that this
may make it easier to move between different versions of Rucksack's file
format.  To make that possible (and to make sure that import/export version
also works for big rucksacks), you'd need to add some features to your
current implementation:

- In general, you can't assume that all persistent objects fit in memory.
   (If they do, probably more than 50% of Rucksack's code is not necessary.)
   This means that using a hash-table to map from object ids to objects
   will not work in general.  You'll need something disk-based instead.
   The object-table file, for example...

- For big rucksacks, you'll create an enormously big lambda form.  You can't
   expect that your Lisp implementation will be able to compile such a form
   (it may not even be able to read it).

- You'd need to export (and import) everything that Rucksack saves on disk.
   This includes the schema table, for example.  And everything that Rucksack
   can serialize, including hash tables and arrays.

Arthur