Forum OpenACS Q&A: The maniac plan for world domination

As correctly noted in the other thread, we need a new thread to the discuss world domination plans.

I think one way to view it is to try to imagine yourself in the shoes of a potential user. I have made a laundry list, so beware :)

Suppose I find the information provided convincing and want to see OpenACS with my own eyes. Here OpenACS fails terribly:

1. There is www.oacsrocks.org, but it cannot be found.
2. Suppose I want to install OpenACS to try it. Now I need to compile AOLserver from source, and find and compile all kinds of AOLserver modules from scratch. For some of these modules, documentation isn't that great.
3. The OpenACS install documentation is reasonable, but not that great either.
4. Suppose I get the thing up and running. Unfortunately some killer features of OpenACS, like the search engine, are next to impossible to get running; compiling tsearch2 into an existing PostgreSQL is extremely challenging.

Now suppose, I am impressed with OpenACS and want to learn how to set up my own site. Unfortunately:

• I don't speak TCL
• I don't know the AOLserver API.
• I don't know the OpenACS API.

infact all of this is already under way in some form.

the key problem has been human hours available to dedicate to this as most of us are consultants or have fulltime jobs + real lives to take care of.

so, thats neither here nor there.

there are actually a good number of steps before this:

1. update the website to xowiki
2. update the templating infrastructure (work being done on this) to allow for skinning
3. documentation project
4. organization and promotion project

but most importantly, the workload is so huge to get all of this done that it needs to be split up into subprojects and properly catalogued and 'maintained' so that we can start to attract help for each one of these initiatives.

to that end, i'm putting up a 'project manager' (or have been for a while now despite the infinite number of distractions) as a test scenario to try and see how our 'project manager' software works and how we can improve it to better organize our efforts.

we don't have a hard time finding help, we have a hard time keeping descreet units of random open source help organized and pointed in the same direction simply because the size and power of the toolkit/project.

so, are you interested in jumping in and helping out first with using project manager to organize the effort on a trial basis?

- if pm turns out to be a good tool for organizing, then the proposal is to mount it on the updated website so that we can manage our activites live as opposed through back channels like forums, irc, email, etc. ... again only for those that find tools like pm usefull.

i will add additional info as it arrives.

We may take one easy step toward this goal. I agree that all the ideas that have been mentioned so far need to be done, but could we reach for some "low hanging fruit"?

I'm somewhat midway between an installation expert and a "regular" user. I just happen to install the latest UBUNTU release on my laptop. You install a CD, and then this program called "adept" shows you a huge list of packages to install with just one click. I patiently reviewed this long list and Moodle was there. So, with one click, and after answering a few questions about installation parameters that adept took care of, I had an instance of moodle running (haven't tried it, I was just curious about its installation)

I kept browsing through the package collection, and I found:
* aolserver4 (4.0.10)
* aolserverdoc
* nscache
* nsimap
* nsldap
* nsopenssl
* npostgres
* nssha1

Of course, you have also postgresql. The other thing that surprised me is that you may install the latest TCL, which right now is 8.4.10 and when checking for thread support:

$ tclsh
% info exists tcl_platform(threaded)
1
% info patchlevel
8.4.14
%

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that out of all the steps that need to be followed to deploy OpenACS/.LRN, the most difficult ones are no longer there.

I haven't tried it yet, but It seems a regular user may start installing OpenACS/.LRN from the section "Prepare the database" on and bypass compiling AOLServer, modules, etc. Are we that far away from providing an OpenACS/.LRN package for UBUNTU that puts the user one click away from having a painless installation?

The fact that Dell will now offer the choice to have Ubuntu pre-installed should not be overlooked either.

Cheers.

this is why i'm gonna put up an instance of pm for this, no one even knows whos going for which low hanging fruit.

and its precisely because:

a) there is no master todo list
b) no prioritization
c) no infrastructure for bringing new talent into points in the process that meet their needs/interests/skills.

i.e. you are re-doing what is already under way.

here are your two options:

1. i alread spoke with frankie the maintainer of aolserver to backport postgres and aolserver and components to current debian stable (which is what you should be running as a server), we already have automated scripts that download everything from cvs and build and install it so packaging is trivial.

however frankies time costs money and him being the best to package aolserver, postgres and bits we should pay him for his time. care to donate some money with me to pay him to do this?

2. you can talk to jim and dirkgomez about their packaging effortst (dirk is doig .lrn, jim on packaging all the individual packages via an automated build system) and you can help out there.

if you want low hanging fruit, let me get out frankies quote and lets get some cash together, split it 5 ways and we can have instant packages and a repo in about a week or two done by the AOLSERVER maintainer (that is to say, properly, no halfway bullshit).

in other words, low hanging fruit is great, you really need to be aware of whats already been done and how much tho to effectively achieve that.

any takers? the more people we split frankies time between the cheaper it gets and the faster it's up and running.

cheers,
Torben