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3.1 Requirements

Elephant is a multi-platform, multi-lisp and multi-backend system. As such there is a great deal of complexity in testing. The system has tried to minimize external dependencies as much as possible to ease installation, but it still requires some patience and care to bring Elephant up on any given platform. This section attempts to simplify this for new users as much as possible. Patches and suggestions will be gladly accepted.

3.1.1 Supported Lisp, Platform and Data store combinations

Elephant supports SBCL, Allegro, Lispworks, OpenMCL and CMUCL. Each lisp is supported on each of the platforms it runs on: Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. As of release 0.6.1, both 32-bit and 64-bit systems should be supported.

Due to the small number of developers and the large number of configurations providing full test coverage is problematic. There are:

  1. Five lisp environments
  2. Three Operating System platforms
  3. 32-bit or 64-bit OS/compilation configuration
  4. Three data store configurations: Berkeley DB, SQLite3 and Postgresql

which means that the total number of combinations to be tested could be as much as:

lisps * os * radix * dstore = 5 * 3 * 2 * 3 = 90 configurations

Not all of these combinations are valid, but the implication is that not every combination will be tested in any given release. The developers and user base regularly use the following platforms

The CLSQL backend is used predominantly under SBCL on Linux and Mac OS X at the time of writing. The developers will do their best to accomodate users who are keen to test other combinations, but the above configurations will be the most stable and reliable.

Elephant is now quite stable in general, so don't be afraid to try an unemphasized combination - chances are it is just a little more work to bring it up. In particular, Elephant can probably work with MySQL or Oracle with just a little work, but nobody has asked for this yet.

3.1.2 Library dependencies

The Elephant core system requires:

  1. asdf – http://www.cliki.net/asdf
  2. uffi – requires version 1.5.18 or later, http://uffi.b9.com/ or http://www.cliki.net/UFFI
  3. cl-base64 – http://www.cliki.net/cl-base64
  4. gcc – Your system needs GCC (or Cygwin) to build the Elephant C-based serializer library. (Precompiled DLL's are available for Windows platforms on the download page.
  5. rt – The RT regression test sytem is required to run the test suite: http://www.cliki.net/RT

Follow the instructions at these URLs to download and setup the libraries. (Note: uffi and cl-base64 are asdf-installable for those of you with asdf-install on your system). Elephant, however, is not asdf-installable today.

In addition to these libraries, each data store has their own dependencies as discussed in Berkeley DB and CL-SQL.