[okfn-help] ORDF ticket #53: work with vanilla rdflib, remove 4store dependencies.

Tue Jun 15 18:52:09 BST 2010

On 10-06-15 13:05, Graham Higgins wrote:
>
> If we took the questionable step of standardising on rdflib < 3.0 (as
> the last stable release supporting a complete SPARQL implementation),
> we would still be facing the long-standing difficulties that users can
> meet in compiling the C-based part of the SPARQL implementation. In
> effect, we'd be swapping one set of compilation problems for another.

I'm not convinced this is an issue. I've never run across it and I've
run 2.4.2 on Linux, OSX, Solaris, NetBSD and FreeBSD. One of
their tickets is basically someone with a Mac who had a misconfigured
development environment -- python linked against one set of libraries
and trying to build against a different one.

There are binary packages for 2.4.2 for even the operating systems
that are otherwise out of date.

I think this is the path of least resistance and nothing is stopping us
from working with 3.0.0 as well.

At least now we are in a state where our code works but some queries
that are possible to do (which are not the ones that our UI does in
the normal course of events) may take unacceptably long to run. We
can hope for improvements to rdflib in the future.

> Taking the more supportable step of standardising on rdflib >= 3.0.0
> doesn't get us out of the woods, however. There is reasonably clear
> evidence that, at the moment, the rdfextras package is a
> work-in-progress. For example, the source defines a class
> 'NotImplemented' that takes two args: 'code' and 'msg'. However,
> elsewhere in same source code file, the class is instantiated with
> just one arg, the 'msg'. This is reasonably trivial to fix but, in
> conjunction with the fact that the tests for the SPARQL implementation
> nearly all fail, it does indicate that a move to rdflib 3.0.0 would
> require a significant amount of work on our part to ensure that the
> ORDF library continued to function at its current level.

Noted. 3.0.0 really isn't ready yet.

Cheers,
-w

-- 
William Waites           <william.waites at okfn.org>
Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK