Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Any comment from the community?

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Posted by Jon Griffin on
Robert,
I shouldn't respond but flaming me is a personal thing.

I am glad you think that OACS is the project of the century. If you check other things I have written, you will find other articles besides this about OACS.

You are right I have been around since the beginning, I have put my money where my mouth is. I have donated a crap load of things whether they were accepted or not.

To be honest with you I don't really give a crap about OACS anymore, it is basically dotlrn at this point. That is fine, just don't pretend it is something else.

xowiki is a great addition to the core and is still being fought by several members of the community who think that OACS is their project. What about this great new templating scheme that broke sites on 5.3 upgrades with no warning?> Oh wait it only works on dotlrn.

The bottom line is OACS is irrelevant in the real world. Barring a few universities, it is a non-issue. I tried to get dotlrn into UNLV, too buggy and too complicated.

The rest of the community is free to flame me, certain members will anyway, but it still won't change the situation.

I wrote that article to hopefully point out some LONG standing issues and directions. If you took it as something else, oh well, your problem.

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Let's just say Jon is right what needs to be done and I think it is good to have it written down. Will we have the time to do it? Well, I start to use XoTCL already quite a lot. I offered to write the code that lets you edit the templates and css files, yet was stopped by Don who wants to clean up the current issues with templating and CSS before going down that road.

Moving to naviserver is an option, but at the moment, who has the time to test it? Gustaf did this at some time so he would probably be able to give a good introduction what he found out.

As for moving stuff out of OpenACS, feel free to do it. I guess we have enough on our hands to get stuff into OpenACS to think about abstracting stuff and get it out 😊.

No need to start a flame war. OpenACS is a niche product which allows us especially with the latest version of xotcl-core, to really go wild and quickly develop applications. But it is a niche product and if it werent for ]po[, aims, xo* we could just call it .LRN. And I would strongly ask the .LRN crew to think outside the box and make sure (before releasing) that things still work outside .LRN.

We did a mistake with the 5.3.1 release especially with regards to the large amount of changes that needed to be done there. Hopefully a lesson has been learned and we can clean up the situation by the 5.4 release.

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Oh, Jon, you fucking ignorant piece of shit...
xowiki is a great addition to the core and is still being fought by several members of the community who think that OACS is their project.
Gustaf has long said he has no interest in supporting Oracle.

And his shit is BSD, rather than GPL.

Now, recently, Gustaf has been encouraged to support Oracle

(Jon: read ... MONEY)

So we may adopt it. Though the BSD issue is important.

If you care enough to trash us in public, why don't you drop into the openacs channel in IRC to trash us in a private scenario which is logged for the public?

What about this great new templating scheme that broke sites on 5.3 upgrades with no warning?> Oh wait it only works on dotlrn.

There was warning.

You are just too fucking stupid to realize thae if you want to be part of the community, you must be part of it.

OCT mtgs - OPEN TO EVERYONE, EVEN THE FUCKING IGNORANT LIKE JON GRIFFIN - every Wednesday, 1600 GMT.

.LRN leadership meeting, Tuesday, same hour.

Come bitch and tell us YOUR vision of where the toolkit should go, and tell us how much time you have to do it, or how much money you have to see various things implemented.

To come bitch afterwards, after IGNORING PLEAS TO TEST PRE-RElEASE VERIONS, well ...

You are acting like a parasite, not a contributor.

What are you, as parasite, contributing that contributors ($$$) should value?

You haven't contributed to the project in YEARS. You're saying ... "y'all are interfering with my ability to be a parasite!"

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT!

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Posted by Gustaf Neumann on
This thread has left all technical grounds, but i will add a small comment against my own principles in order to reduce false information and rumors. Don said:
Gustaf has long said he has no interest in supporting Oracle.

And his shit is BSD, rather than GPL.

Now, recently, Gustaf has been encouraged to support Oracle

(Jon: read ... MONEY)

What i have said for a long time was that i did not have an installation to work on Oracle and that i am not happy about developments that increase the maintenaince costs of xotcl-core and xowiki on my side.

The platform situation has changed by the nice people from UNED who gave me access to their Oracle installation. On my side, I have developed an easy-to-maintain SQL layer. I did not receive *any* money for any of this work, i did this out of personal interest. Actually, nobody even encouraged me to provide oracle support (there was actually more discouragement). I have learned something during developing this layer, and i think the results are quite good.

Don, please don't talk about things that you don't know. And thanks for the clear words what you think about my contributions.

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Posted by Gustaf Neumann on
Forgot another one:
Oh, Jon, you fucking ignorant piece of shit...
No, he is not. Not everybody has to be a programmer to contribute to a project. I do not agree with all points on on Jon's summary of deficiancies, but there is certain truth in his posting providing hooks for improvements. Who else does this? I know Jon as an interested and factual person from real-live and find these kind of contributions important.

About Jon's statement that OpenACS is "basically dotlrn". No wonder that he gets the impression when an "openacs release" is just the kernel and the first time, improved packages come out is essentially the dotrln release (i remember a statement of Ben Koot in the same regards). This is not your fault, Don, but we have currently nobody but the dotlrn team to care and maintain the most important openacs packages used in plain oacs installations (except the stuff starting with xo*).

Jon, it is in the interest of the dotrln consortium to get rid of the dotrln-specific modules and make dotlrn an ordinary openacs package. This is not an easy task and it will still take some time until we can show results in this regard. But there is will, which is a good start...

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Just wanting to let you know that developer support on 5.4 has a new "uber" feature which is CSS editing. You see your current webpage, click on CSS and get all the currently used CSS files (yeah, webdeveloper can do that for you as well) on a new webpage. What webdeveloper cannot do for you is edit the file and *save it to disk*. Neither is it able to provide revisions for those CSS files that you edited or allow you to go back to a previous revision based on the description developer support stores in the content repository.

People might argue why this is not in package <insert package here>, especially as you might not want to give CSS designers developer support access, on the other hand this was the most convenient place to put it and whoever wants can take the code and stuff it somewhere else.

This has been a joint effort during the ]po[ developers conference between UNED and myself, so kudos for their hard work. Additionally this requires that you have working template::head::add_css commands and that none of your CSS files is loaded manually. Last but not least, make sure that you can access the CSS file from /resources/<insert package here>/....., as I need to somehow find the file on the harddisk 😊.