Forum OpenACS Forum Summaries: Q&A 2004-09-29

OpenACS Q&A Forum Summary: 9/29/2004

(Note: Q&A Forum summaries are made on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. Comments on editorial style welcomed.  If you really want everything, read the whole forum yourself.)

Website

• Roberto Mello warned that openacs.org was having some problems. This spurred Malte Sussdorff to try and upgrade the site to OpenACS 5 (something which is badly overdue). The upgrade looks like it will happen very soon -- Malte outlined how the upgrade process will go. Thank you, Malte and Joel (who did a lot of the initial work).
• Jeroen VanDongen proposed a couple of solutions to the fact that spammers are using openacs.org as a source of email addresses (this is true of all websites). He proposed a number of possible solutions, but Torben Brosten pointed out this would be fixed with the OpenACS 5 upgrade, which hopefully should happen soon.

Community

• Dave Bauer asked people to volunteer to manage the OpenACS Core Team election. It is a fairly easy job.
• Volunteers came forward to volunteer to summarize each of the major forums.

Looking for help (and not getting it)

• David Cotter asked which survey package to use (there are three of them). He also wanted to know if any of the three incorporated scoring. Malte replied that the assessment package incorporated scoring, but not any of the three survey systems, to his knowledge.
• Marc Fournier revived a thread on how to redirect a domain name to a subsite with Apache virtualhost. He pointed out that the earlier recommendations won't work.
• Roger Lockerbie was looking for information on the Tcl API for the content repository. Jade Rubick replied that it wasn't available until OpenACS 5.2.

Looking for help (and getting it)

• Peter Wang asked for help fixing an error that said: Fatal: could not resolve localhost.localdomain via dns. Cathy Sarisky recommended editing his /etc/hosts file.
• Janine Sisk was having character set issues with her upgrade to Aolserver 4. The fix involved adding parameters to her etc/config.tcl file.
• Jose Agustin Lopez Bueno asked if the clustering procs, in which you have multiple Aolservers connected to one database, work correctly. Harish Krishnan said that they run on that architecture, except they use Oracle instead of Postgres. Harish recommended testing it out in a test environment, but said it did work.
• Keith Paskett asked how to reload the localization message files. He got a "MESSAGE KEY MISSING" error. Rocael Hernandez pointed out that the answer to this was in the FAQ.
• Seshu S asked how to install packages on his new installation.

OpenACS Programming (should go in Dev Forum?)

• Harish Krishnan asked if OpenACS would benefit from having an object oriented scripting language. There were arguments for and against object-oriented features, but there's no real reason a something like XOtcl can't be used in packages. The effort to do anything significant to core, however, is substantial, and probably not worth the effort. It also lacks anyone interested in doing the work, which means it isn't going to happen.
• Jose Pablo Escobedo Del Cid asked how to not get errors in Tcl procs when the variable starts with a "-". Jade Rubick replied that you have to use "--".

Developmental statistics

• 85 (-1) open patches
• 567 (+5) open bugs
• 146 (-8) resolved bugs
• 1400 (+11) closed bugs
• 12 (+0)open openacs.org bugs

Developmental links

• OpenACS packages and maintainers