Forum OpenACS Forum Summaries: Q&A 2004-10-04

OpenACS Q&A Forum Summary: 10/6/2004

(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

• The translation servers has been moved by Rocael Hernandez.

Community

• David Cotter volunteered to count the votes. There was some other discussion of how much work the volunteer commitment is. We still are looking for more volunteers, I believe.

Discussion

• Andrei Popov said that Jeffrey's post is a good summary of what is wrong and what should be done in the future with OpenACS's CMS efforts.
• Alfred Werner says his biggest complaint with OpenACS is how hard it is to set up, and suggest we do the unthinkable: use normal Linux conventions in where we set things up, and use the various Linux distributions package installs (RPM and apt-get) to install OpenACS. He suggests we make it much easier to install OpenACS. Bart Teeuwisse says RPMs can be built quite easily, and they can even take advantage of tools such as daemontools, which give the user a lot of control. Bart has worked on building RPMs of OpenACS. The hardest part is that the Tcl that comes with Redhat isn't thread-safe, but we could distribute a separate version that is thread-safe. The version that comes with Debian is thread-safe, according to Dave Bauer. Alfred Werner asked Jeff Hobbs if threaded Tcl can be the default for RedHat in the future. Bart also reported that he has made an RPM for tDOM. Jade Rubick asked for a volunteer to organize what has been done and what needs to be done.

Looking for help (and not getting it)

• Phuong Vuong is having issues installing Postgres 7.1.3 on Redhat 9. Not sure why Phuong wants to do this...
• Mark Aufflick is writing a lecture on his OpenACS development environment, and was looking for suggested material to incorporate.
• Seshu S is getting "child process exited abnormally" errors when trying to install from .apm files in the package manager.
• Jose Agustin Lopez Bueno is looking for a Catalan locale to be set up on the translation server.

Looking for help (and getting it)

• Jade Rubick asked if an e-card package had been developed for OpenACS. Walter Smith said there is a postcard package in contrib/obsolete-packages.
• Anindya Adhikari was having issues with strange looking notifications from OpenACS. Jade Rubick replied that this is a known and fixed bug and the fix will appear in OpenACS 5.1.2
• Willy Jansen was having difficulty redirecting to a subsite, and several people pointed out how to do so.
• Michael Hinds explained how to download packages from CVS.

OpenACS Administration

• Nick Carroll has written documentation on configuring OpenACS to use Postfix. Several people discussed issues with bouncing emails, and how to work around them in Exim and Postfix.
• Jade Rubick released version 1.6 of the resource list package.

OpenACS Programming (should go in Dev Forum?)

• Andrew Piskorski asked if anyone had used Tcl-based make replacements. He found one called Aardvark.
• Andrew Piskorski pointed out that you can use one config.tcl file when you develop for both Oracle and Postgres at the same time. Andrew Grumet suggested writing a developer version of the config file.
• Andrew Grumet said that the ns_info command is unstable, and is crashing his server. He's working with Dossy at Aolserver to find a stable, well-performing alternative, and will update the codebase.

Developmental statistics

• 87 (+2) open patches (oldest patch: 2/13/2003)
• 572 (+0) open bugs
• 149 (+2) resolved bugs
• 1402 (+2) closed bugs
• 12 (+0) open openacs.org bugs

Links

• OpenACS packages and maintainers