Hi Andrew,
thanks for the reply.
<blockquote> installing all of OpenACS and Project Open on Windows,
just to check whether they actually work
</blockquote>
It's the oposite way from our (P/O) perspective: OpenACS inc. PostgreSQL is installed in <10 minutes, so that really shouldn't be an important effort for anybody. I'm only talking about OpenACS. P/O's requirements are uncritical.
The benefit of such an installation is that the AOLServer developers would get an integrated testing environment. They wouldn't have to rely on other persons to report errors but simpley would need to start the OpenACS _installation_ procedure to get a 70% test coverage.
The errors that stopped us were really basic and could probably be resolved by an AOLServer developer probably within minutes.
Concerning the build process: This was a _real_ pain for us. 4.0.beta10 is working more or less satisfactory for us, imagine..., so we're never going to touch this anymore.
I believe that OpenACS + AOLServer has a _huge_ (OSS-) market potential if it would be easier to install, particularly on Win32. But our organizational issues have inhibited this already since several years. Maybe we can finally break this ice.
<blockquote> any "Windows Installer" is doomed to be eternally
out of date
</blockquote>
There is one fact that is probably difficult to swallow for a developer: That even an old version of AOLServer is doing the job. We're still using 3.3oacs on our Linux production environments and I've got _no_ intention to change until I see a major benefit. And a similar situation holds for Win32 with the addition that binary releases are easier on Win32 then on Linux because of a more coherent system environment.
So I would disagree with you on this point. Being "out of date" is not even relevant from a users point of view. AOLServer is very stable in general so a new binary "dumb-user" release every 6 months would be more then sufficient...
However disagreeing, we all have the same objective: Promoting AOLServer + Openacs.
Bests,
Frank
