Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Skills needed to help on OpenACS development

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Well...I recently posted a survey asking some simple questions in order to help me get a better feeling for the level of experience people have, how much time they have, and when they can start working on porting.

I only posted it to those who'd expressed an interest in porting, though.  You're not on my list of volunteers so you've not seen it.

I'm partway through putting together a "Porting HOWTO" for folks that should help people get some idea as to what's involved.  I'm going to try to finish it by the end of the day (since I'm leaving town tomorrow afternoon for a bit).

In order to help port, there are three essential skills that are necessary - you need to be able to understand and write SQL queries, at times fairly complex ones.  You need to be able to understand PL/SQL, which is an Ada-like programming language (easy to pick up) and to be able to figure out how to translate these to PL/pgSQL.  And finally you need to feel comfortable with Tcl.

In my simple survey I asked folks to tell me what versions of the ACS they've worked with.  This gives me some idea of how long they've worked within the framework.  For the most part people have written fairly detailed answers telling me a bit about what they've actually done with the ACS.  So I feel like I have a pretty good idea as to the skill level of most of those folks who are on my volunteer's list.

Even if you can't help in porting, due to inexperience or simply insufficient free time, there's plenty of work to be done on documentation and testing.