Forum OpenACS Development: What's up with the port?

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Just thought I'd pass along a quick note before mobs show up on my
doorstep with torches and pitchforks asking why nothing appears to be
happening.

I've been working on getting the bootstrap procedure to configure
itself for either Oracle or Postgres after probing the default
database pool.  This is working, my next task is to then customize the
database API scripts accordingly.  I expect to be done with this by
the end of the week.

After bootstrapping's complete, database portability will be driven by
Ben's query dispatcher.  He's working on the spec, which I intend to
review later today.  We'll also be modifying the apm to load the
proper datamodel for a package depending on which db is being used.

The idea here is to provide one source that will work on any supported
database without user intervention.  Naturally, the first two that
will be supported are Oracle and Postgres, but this opens the door for
cleanly supporting IB and others.

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Posted by Dan Wickstrom on
That's great Don.  Do you want me to get started on anything?  I've been looking at the kernel data-model pretty closely, and I wouldn't mind getting started on some of the porting work.
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Posted by Roberto Mello on
Same here. I've been itching to do some porting (though I should probably get some beter PL/pgSQL docs into PG). How's CVS going to be handled, since we are not using Sourceforge anymore?
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Posted by Kapil Thangavelu on
in the interest of Don not getting pitchforked, i was wondering how
people felt about starting weekly progress reports. just a sanity
check to show who is working on what and how its going as well as
offering a summary of community discussions. i get the feeling that
a lot of development/communication is taking place by email, which
is fine, but it makes it much harder for people to get involved when
they're is no visible sign of development or information about whats
going on. (yes, i'll volunteer for it). i'm actually curious if this
is an effect of trying to have track development on a bboard vs
using a mailing list.

personally i'm eager to help with the porting process, but what i
glean from these bboards seem a bit lean on info. so at the moment i
have no idea what i can do to help out.

my summary of whats concurrently out on the bboards and who working
on what.

1. ben's working on a query dispatcher, and hopefully some specs
will appear, that will explain what its going to do and why its not
going to be burden to do run time query dispatching.

2. don's working on getting the system to boot without oracle.

3. roberto's working on pl/pgsql porting guide.

4. the rest (whoever you are) are twiddling thumbs.

the community discussions summary.

1. some talk on using Pg's object inheritance features. they're was
some discussion back and forth regarding portability. no final say
was ever really explicitly stated. but based on the general
unwritten sentiment and some inferring (the query dispatcher taking
care of portability concerns) i guess pg extensions are in.

2. where is the cvs respository? (incidentally why not sourceforge?)

3. some interesting discussion in the guidelines thread about
automajically generating dml and dql, as well as the need for the
acs objects to have a higher level definitions (xml anyone?).

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Yes, I intend to post steady reports, though I don't know if they'll be precisely weekly.  I'll post more information in the next couple of days.  Unfortunately, I hold tickets that take me to Boston tomorrow and I've been told it might snow a bit 'tween now and then so I don't know exactly what my personal schedule will be this week.

The CVS repository is reachable by chasing the "software" link from the home page, then the "software development manager" link.  You can browse the sources directly if you want.

Why not sourceforge?  The SDM has reached the point where it provides similar services, indeed I like the ticket tracker a lot better.  As part of the toolkit, we should be using it and working to improve it.  Finally, SourceForge tends to get pretty bogged down at time.  I downloaded a bunch of stuff from a project there last week and the ftp  server was only able to fill my DSL line with about 80KB/sec worth of  stuff.  Frustrating to take so long to download when you have a nice 640KB line.

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Posted by Jonathan Ellis on
you mean Kb, right?
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Posted by Don Baccus on
Uh, yeah, Kb ... 640KB/sec for $29.95/month would be awesome, though, wouldn't it?
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Posted by Kapil Thangavelu on
the sdm is a great piece of software but chasing source through its
cvs interface is tedious at best. is there a way to get an anonymous
cvs checkout of the current openacs4 branch?

i guess what i'm looking for with the reports is more an idea of
where effort can best be applied to help with the port as well as
bit of status check. basically, i would like to help but i have not
a clue as to what i could work on at the moment, and it seems like
the only thing to do is wait. (which i'm not good at:)

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Have you tried an anonymous checkout?  It might just work, I dunno...

I'll be posting another port update in a moment, things have firmed up  and I can pass along more specifics that I think will please you.