Forum OpenACS Development: Next steps towards getting the port effort underway

Unless someone finds a critical bug soon, I'm going to let the APM sit
for a few days.

I plan to spend time in the next couple of days trying to get things
organized so other people can start porting modules.  I'll probably be
doing a lot of this via e-mail and some of this via the bboard
mechanism.  I have some other stuff I need to do in the next few days
as well, so I don't expect to really have a handle on who's doing what
and when they're doing it until next week.  I'll report steadily as we
figure it out, though.

We also need to figure out how to decide who can commit to the tree.
Presumably those working on a module should be able to commit directly.

Which reminds me that the tree needs to be set up for non-core
modules, and the SDM needs to be set up to know about modules, etc etc.

It will be tomorrow before I'll have time to post an updated list of
volunteers hackers, documenters and testers, much less start to
communicate with people in order to get more specific information
about how much time they have to offer, starting when, etc etc.

Don, I had originally planned on helping port the news module. However, after looking at its .info file, I see that it depends on the content repository. Until this is done, there probably isn't a lot I can do with the news module.

This brings up the general point that we have to remember to factor in the dependencies amongst the modules when farming out work. I'm sure you already know this, but I overlooked this myself.

There are still a few oracle-specific issues left with the content-repository that need to addressed, but enough of it has been ported to support other modules.

The work that remains for the content-repository includes adding a search mechanism, and adding support for xml import/export of content-revsions.  In addition, we plan on adding support for storing content in the file-system at some later date.

Before getting started on porting anything that depends on the content-repository, you should familiarize yourself with the "lob-hack" that Don developed for openacs 3.x.  The content-repository for openacs 4.x uses either a lob field, a text field or a file (not implemented yet) for storing content.

Wow, the CR's almost done? Great! OK, I'll just be patient and wait.