[okfn-help] vdm versus Clio

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

[I previously mailed this to the info@ address. Jonathan Gray wrote
back I'd probably get more feedback here on okfn-help, so here I am]

I've been looking at the vdm library to see whether it would be
applicable to my projects. I created a library called Clio:

http://packages.python.org/clio/

This tries to do some of the same things as vdm does, except that I
think vdm probably uses better architecture. So I'm considering
whether I should dump Clio and shift to vdm for my projects.

In the use cases for vdm, I'm particularly interested in use case 9
listed, support for pending updates. This is what Clio's been designed
to do. Recovering historical revisions is interesting too, especially
the auditing aspect of it, but the primary use case is to let someone
edit a database (through a web UI typically), adding, removing and
editing records, and then this person, or someone else, can then later
publish these changes, so that they become available for the consumers
of this database.

>From the use cases for vdm however I fear that this hasn't been
implemented yet, do I read this correctly? I see a few references to a
PENDING state in the code, but not a lot. If it isn't there, how hard
would it be to add this functionality? What is vdm being used for
primarily right now?

In general I'm a bit at a loss to figure out what vdm's API is and how
it is to be used. I've tried to read the code, but any hints would be
appreciated.

If vdm turns out to be useful to my purposes, I'd be happy to help
contribute to it, including improved documentation, which I think it
needs. :)

Regards,

Martijn