Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Is it time for NaviServ Again?

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Posted by Don Baccus on
I hope you realize the one you're using for 4.5 doesn't actually work as you expect?

That's the bad news Jon's referring to (4.5 ignores the min/maxconnections parameters).

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Posted by Don Baccus on
That reply was to malte (we need to upgrade this forums instance so we actually display this flat forum in flat form!)
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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
If 4.5 ignores that setting completely, even more reason to make this a) Known within OpenACS and b) provide the patch along with it. I did not run in this problem so far as I never checked these parameters and therefore have no expectations about them whatsoever.
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Posted by Tom Jackson on
This isn't really in response to any of the above, just an update based upon further analysis and testing.

Here is the deal: AOLserver 4.5 should probably only be used by OpenACS installations using a single virtual server per nsd instance. Threadpools are shared among virtual servers, so you can only set one 'default' threadpool. It is currently unknow if data or code could migrate from one virtual server to another, which would be very bad. But essentially the very well thought out threadpool functionality which was available in AOLserver 4.0.10 has been replaced with broken code and configuration in a truely unbelievably stupid move. Of course this was backed up with no documentation or notification, and the developers at AOL don't even appear to understand how the new code works or doesn't work or how it should be used.

Malte: the code above should just be ignored. It should have been placed in a file pools.tcl as I indicated. I only posted it here so that anyone who didn't watch the AOLserver list would be able to get it without hunting around in the cvs on sourceforge. But it doesn't work due to broken C code.

I don't think this bodes well for the future of AOLserver since we have a combination of secrecy, poor decisionmaking and ass covering at AOL. We can probably add to that no accountability, since I'm sure there is nothing we can do about it. At least tomorrow is Friday!

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Tom et al., although I can't really disagree with your complaints about the AOLserver 4.5 development, communication, etc., I think you may be overreacting a bit. So, they committed some likely ill-thought out code, and then eventually released it before it was ready, all without nearly enough communication and review. Bad, yes, but it does happen, and shouldn't be an insurmountable problem - just an obnoxious one.

Also, it's not like us other folks in the AOLserver community jumped all over the problem first thing! E.g., I'm still using 4.0.10, haven't touched it in ages, and have barely looked at the 4.5 code, even though it was released back in June 2006, more than a year ago!

Btw, Tom, thanks for discovering and really digging into these 4.5 problems.

I also wonder how much of the premature 4.5 release was driven or abetted by internal turmoil at AOL, which the AOL guys never talk about publically on the AOLserver list. It sounds to me as if most of the AOLserver developers - including Jim Davidson - are now employed at other companies doing other things, and the few that remain at AOL are probably no longer working directly on AOLserver related projects at all. I think an AOL employee alluded to this recently on the list by saying something like, "If it wasn't for the [open source] community, AOLserver would have been dead two years ago."

Also, Tom, re. your "I'm sure there is nothing we can do about it." comment - that seems too negative to me! There is certainly something we could do about it - we could "simply" invest the time to figure out and commit changes to the code! (We could; I'm not saying we should have to, and the wasted effort in straightening out someone else's broken new code when the old was perfectly good is always annoying.) There are many non-AOL folks who have CVS commit access to AOLserver on SourceForege, note, even if hardly any of them ever use it.

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Posted by Tom Jackson on
Andrew,

Please refer to my first comment in this thread. Until yesterday I pretty much agreed that I was overreacting. But after further discussion and analysis, it is obvious that the best case situation is that the AOL developers are just bad programmers. Worst case is of course that they are just pretending to care about the larger AOLserver community. It is time to stop speculating and demand change which we can verify, or just stop listening to the BS. Why waste another second working on a dead-end? This is the issue. These things waste everyone's time, and if mere ignorance is the reason AOLserver didn't die two years ago, it is little consolation. Do they take everyone for complete idiots? Apparently.