On Sun, 2008-05-11 at 19:50 -0400, Glenn Tarcea wrote: > What do you all think about allowing two different versions of > Elephant to be installed at the same time? I tried to have both my > original version of Elephant installed and also to install elephant- > unstable. Currently there are a lot of dependencies on the system > name sprinkled throughout the code that prevent this. My thought > would be to allow someone to do a (require 'elephant-unstable) (or > some other chosen system name) and have it load an alternative > version of Elephant. All the package names would stay the same, just > the systems would be different.
I think this could be very nice for the reasons you mention. I personally don't know how to do it. I suspect any workable solution would have to be an asdf-based solution, not just using 'requre. > > The benefit to this is it would allow users to test out the new > functionality before deciding to switch, and for testers, it would > mean we could have both versions installed. It seems like this would > be helpful right now when the BerkeleyDB interfaces have stabilized, > but the postmodern interface hasn't. For me it would allow me to test > and observe behavior in the old environment and then easily switch > over to the new environment. > > If no one objects I can look into this further, at least drawing up a > plan of attack and posting it for comment. I think it is definitely worth trying to figure out how to do it. However, an added complication is that any objects created are created under a certain version, which may not be readable by another version. Ian has objectified this with his "schema numbering" for classes in elephant-unstable. The idea situation is that Elephant version N+K can read any Elephant object written by version N. I think we are moving toward that capability. However, even if one version can't read another version, being able to have two distinct packages in one image could be useful---I encourage you to spend some time thinking through how it might work. > > Also, it looks like the testing framework is being migrated over to > 5am. I assume this means that I should write any new tests using 5am? Yes --- I believe we are already completely dependent on 5am for testing. > > Thanks, > > Glenn > _______________________________________________ > elephant-devel site list > elephant-devel@common-lisp.net > http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/elephant-devel _______________________________________________ elephant-devel site list elephant-devel@common-lisp.net http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/elephant-devel
