Forum OpenACS Development: Re: FYI: My Vision and priorities for OpenACS

5: Re: FYI: My Vision and priorities for OpenACS (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 01/30/04 07:31 PM

A few things:

<blockquote> this would mean that the project-manager is integrated
with logger which is integrated with your calendar
</blockquote>

This is a very high priority for me. Lars, let's talk about how to best do this.

I think one of the biggest barriers to getting OpenACS into more people's hands in the installation. It has improved A LOT in the last year or so, but it would be really great if someone could step forward and commit to doing Debian packages, or an install script, or something. Or a series of scripts.

And then we should advertise our existence on places like FreshMeat as well.

Anyway, this is just something that I'd like to see happen. I don't really have the resources to do it myself, and unfortunately, I think a lot of us are in that boat. But if we did, it would make a big difference for the community. It might be more important than anything else we're doing, actually.

7: Re: FYI: My Vision and priorities for OpenACS (response to 5)

Posted by Lars Pind on 01/31/04 02:31 AM

Jade, I know this is as important to you as it is to me. I haven't contacted you yet about this, because I aren't sure myself. I'll dig into this after the 5.1 release, however.

On installation, I'm personally of the opinion that everything we can do to make OpenACS install a simple matter of .deb or .rpm packages would be a huge step, but given that I don't have the resources to make it happen, offering hosted solutions would be a viable solution for now.

Freshmeat and other forms of advertising are indeed important. We've also talked about getting on sourceforge in the past. We have a pretty active community, and making it to top 5/10/20 on sourceforge could very well drive some new interest in the platform. Heck, it might even motivate some of us to put in some extra effort to move one more nudge up the activity ranking.

/Lars

8: Re: FYI: My Vision and priorities for OpenACS (response to 7)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 01/31/04 07:31 AM

First of all: Excellent points Lars.

What does it take to get us to sourceforge and up their ranking? How could we transfer our activity into their ranking?

If we want to adopt more developers, we'll most likely need the .deb or .rpm packages even if the installation got considerably easier.

Hosting solutions will mainly be attractive to new users unless you talk about virtual servers with preinstalled OpenACS. But will a *new* developer pay for this kind of hosting when only wanting to try and play with OpenACS in his/her sparetime ?

9: Re: FYI: My Vision and priorities for OpenACS (response to 8)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 01/31/04 07:36 AM

Regarding hosting solutions and ASP services. I know of a couple of people considering to start their own ASP services. And most likely there are even more out there. I wondered if there would be an incentive to build at least one ASP solution (done by one or more people building a partnership) up on behalf of OpenACS, which would allow to pay for core enhancements.