Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to How are upgrades accomplished?

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Posted by Don Baccus on
If it makes you feel any better, Brent, it's not an ACS/pg problem, it's an ACS-in-general problem.  This is a case where Oracle users are no better off than us.

There's a rationale that can lead one to believe that this isn't so bad, in practice.  In order to build a "real" web site on top of the ACS, one which is highly customized such as scorecard.org or eplay.com,  you have to hack the hell out of all the Tcl scripts because that's where the presentation HTML is generated (except for e-commerce  and a couple of other modules that use the templating system).

Once you've hacked the hell out of all those Tcl scripts, upgrading is  going to be a major pain.

So you won't do it.  That argument has been made in the past by folks within aD, or at least the claim's been made that "most of our customers don't want to upgrade once their site's done".

aD has held some touchingly naive views in the past, in this software engineer's opinion.  "Backward compatibility just slows down progress"  is one interesting mantra.  They've been leaving a trail of web sites  orphaned from their forward development path.

Recently, more traditional views seem to be surfacing, perhaps as aD hires more folks with real-world experience working to keep customers happy over the long-term.  That's a good thing, IMO.