Forum OpenACS Development: AOLserver Update

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1: AOLserver Update
Posted by Jamie Rasmussen on 11/08/02 02:21 PM
We had another great AOLserver chat yesterday.  Throughout most of it, the room was filled to capacity.  (23 people - AOL is increasing the room's limit for next week).  The full log can be downloaded from SourceForge. My summary of the conversation is below.  Next week we are discussing what is needed to move OpenACS to standard AOLserver distributions.  We could really use your input on this!  I'm going to start a proposal document outlining the necessary changes, please email me if you can help.  It will probably go on the AOLserver Wiki for people to review before the chat.  We've been discussing lots of interesting topics on the AOLserver mailing list lately and I encourage everyone here to join in.  The mailing list archive has more information on all of these topics.

Core Team Discussion

Scott Goodwin, Dossy Shiobara, and Zoran Vasiljevic are running for the core team.  Roberto Mello and Peter Jansson were nominated during the meeting and I assume they're running because neither said "no".  Dan Wickstrom and Jeff Hobbes were also nominated but were not at the meeting to accept or decline.  You have through the weekend to decide to run.  Candidates and their statements will be posted Monday, community voting will be Tuesday and Wednesday, results will be announced at next Thursday's chat.

Documentation Effort

There is a big community push to get the entire AOLserver 3.5.1 C and TCL APIs documented this month.  We still need lots of help.  The docs are going to be roff-formatted for now.  If that is a barrier for you, you can send in plain-text content and someone will format it for you.  The man pages should have code examples when possible.  Scott is interested in converting these code examples to tests in a testing framework.

Win32 Support

Native Win32 support is going back into the core on both the 3.x and 4.x branches.  It will use Redhat's pthread library, though long-term we are hoping to get thread improvements in the TCL core that will make that unnecessary. I've already done most of the required work and will be creating patches for the core team to review.  We'll be hosting the binary distributions and installers on SourceForge.

Releases

AOLserver 3.5.1 has been released.  AOLserver would like to release a 3.6 in early December.  Current goals for that release are Win32 support, full documentation, and any needed bug fixes.  3.6 is intended to be the last of the 3.x series.  One important question: Can/should we get the ad13 changes into 3.6?  A roadmap for the 4.0 release is one of the first tasks for the core team.  Nathan says, "4.0 is closer than you might think."  
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2: Re: AOLserver Update (response to 1)
Posted by Jun Yamog on 11/08/02 03:29 PM
Thanks very much Jamie for the update.  Please keep them coming for the benefit of those that are not that active in aolserver... like me.

I was thinking of the candidate, granted that Rob Mayoff is still around and interested he would be a real good candidate.  For me he really made a big difference in aolserver, atleast ACS wise.  I wonder where is he these days... is he still active in aolserver?

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3: Re: AOLserver Update (response to 1)
Posted by Janine Ohmer on 11/08/02 03:34 PM
Rob is still on the AOLserver list but last time I talked to him he said he wasn't using it in his job and no longer had any interest in spending his free time on it.  Too bad, as I think he would be the best candidate of all, but I doubt he would accept if he won.

Of course, he's free to correct me if I'm wrong - I'll be happy to nominate him myself! :)

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4: Re: AOLserver Update (response to 1)
Posted by Jun Yamog on 11/08/02 03:44 PM
Its ok... we are all volunteers in OSS.  Rob Mayoff has already made his fair share and mark on OSS.  I thank him for his contributions.
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5: Re: AOLserver Update (response to 1)
Posted by Roberto Mello on 11/08/02 04:16 PM
While I was flattered to be nominated, I think I haven't really proven myself in AOLserver (C) development to be in the Core Team. Peter Jansson nominated me because he believes someone from OpenACS should be in the core team. While I think that would be good, and I don't think it is essential. Scott (for one) has been sympathetic to the project, and is a good leader, and as such will listen.

I exchanged e-mail with Dan about his nomination yesterday and he said something important: the ACT needs to be formed of competent people _with time_ to work on it. So he's not going to run either.

One thing that I brought up during that chat was the ad13 patches, especifically i18n. Nathan said they will commit to putting those patches (which I'm trying to generate to send to Nathan) in for the next release of AOLserver. That would be great because we could stop distributing our own AOLserver version.

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6: Re: AOLserver Update (response to 5)
Posted by Jamie Rasmussen on 11/08/02 05:30 PM
I got a slightly different impression.  I think the discussion on the agenda for next week is to determine whether the Arsdigita patches should be rolled into 3.6 and/or 4.0.  I think getting the patches into both is likely but not certain - they seem eager to get 3.6 out.  Of course, it will be more likely if you've done the patches and shown that it works!

I've done some comparisons between AOLserver 3.5.1 and AOLserver 3.3.1 + ad13 + oacs1.  The doc is incomplete, particulary regarding i18n, but hopefully useful.  I started from Rob's AD13 distribution notes.  http://www.panoptic.com/wiki/aolserver/92.html

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7: Re: AOLserver Update (response to 6)
Posted by Neophytos Demetriou on 11/08/02 05:39 PM
"I've done some comparisons between AOLserver 3.5.1 and AOLserver 3.3.1 + ad13 + oacs1.  The doc is incomplete, particulary regarding i18n, but hopefully useful.  I started from Rob's AD13 distribution notes. "

Jamie, I suggest that you take a look at Pierre's i18n patches (available at SF) since they were made for 3.4 -- that will at least save you some time rather than starting from 3.3.1+ad13. Still, if you want to start from 3.3.1+ad13 it might be good to contact him. Just for the record, I'm using Pierre's patches under 3.4 and they seem to work fine.

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8: Re: AOLserver Update (response to 7)
Posted by Jamie Rasmussen on 11/08/02 06:06 PM
I've looked at Pierre's patches briefly - they only cover the i18n modifications, but are certainly a good starting point for that issue.  (SF Patch #570072)  Thanks for the pointer!  I'll add this to the Wiki doc.

ad13 had a number of non-i18n related bugfixes and added features as well.  I'm hoping we can move any of these that are necessary over to the main AOLserver tree as well.  I don't want to leave any excuses for people not to upgrade. 😊

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9: Re: AOLserver Update (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on 11/08/02 07:00 PM
Jamie,

The uid/gid issue was fixed in >= 3.5. You can take that one of the list.

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10: Re: AOLserver Update (response to 1)
Posted by Jamie Rasmussen on 11/15/02 12:38 PM
Another good AOLserver chat last night. SourceForge is down but hopefully we can upload the log soon. You can also see it here. My unofficial summary:

Core Team

The final list of nominees and voting instructions should be coming this evening. Jeff Hobbes convinced AOL to have four community members on the core team instead of three. AOL will still have three representatives.

Documentation Effort

We're making progress but can still use volunteers.

Integrating ad13+oacs1 patches

The need to keep the core server generic, simple, and clean is stressed. AOL agrees that i18n support in 3.x is important enough that it shouldn't wait for 4.0. They will review any core patches we submit for inclusion in 3.6. [Who wants to work on this? Please let me know.]

Other

The 4.0 roadmap is still in the works. 4.0 should be mostly backwards compatible - Zoran mentions that some Ns_DString functions have gone away and Nathan says there will be subtle differences in the way the server initializes things. AOL is still upgrading things to 3.5 internally, but will be testing 4.0 upgrades soon. They'll keep notes.

Lamar suggests changing the name back to NaviServer, Nathan says a vote might be possible at some point. Dossy suggests getting T-shirts made, Nathan will check with AOL's lawyers.

This wasn't actually mentioned during the chat, but Jim has checked some Win32 stuff into the 3.5 tree. Win32 nsthreads won't be using Redhat's pthread lib after all. We are working on a few last issues.