Robert and I have agreed about moving Elephant towards a 1.0 release. Elephant isn't perfect, but more and more people appear to be having success using it and we feel this kind of predictability is important for its ongoing adoption. The purpose of this 1.0 release is to provide a stable long-term platform for users with a commitment from us to back patch the release as necessary to fix any significant bugs. It also is a clear statement about our confidence in the platform.

The major emphasis from this point forward is test coverage, stability and documentation. I'm particularly interested in documenting more use-cases and best-practices. Alex's discussion of using derived indices to make selecting messages by username and dates is one example.

We would like to institute an effective feature freeze as of the upcoming beta release, so before we institute that freeze, I'd like invite everyone to weigh in on smaller features or annoyances that would make a big difference to the utility, usability or stability of 1.0. For example I'd like to implement/integrate a dump/restore capability to/from XML or s-expressions.

You can see what we've got planned in the elephant trac roadmap:
http://trac.common-lisp.net/elephant/roadmap

Click on any of the milestone there to see the current tickets associated with it.

Given that everyone is quite busy, it may take a few months to get to 1.0. The best way to contribute to this process is to start using elephant-unstable (which I will rename to something less scary) and make sure the test suite passes on as wide a variety of platforms, lisps and data stores as possible. In particular, testing the upgrade procedure on real applications from 0.9.1 to elephant-unstable would be very helpful.

Thank you,
Ian
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