Forum OpenACS Development: A couple of schedule questions...

I meant to update the schedule this weekend but forgot.  I did update the status sheet and pinged a fair number of people for information.

The biggest piece left for the ACS Core is portions of ACS Subsite.  Steve Woodcock's going to try to finish it by August 1 after he returns from holiday, but it will be tight.

We have a proposed alpha release data for site-wide-search of August 10th, though maybe August 15th is more realistic - this is a big job as we're trying to work through details of abstracting out a search API so packages can work with Intermedia (oracle) or "the Russian Solution" (postgres).  Neophytos is doing the bulk of the work on the module, Dan on the support pieces.

My impression is that most if not all of the assigned packages will be done by August 15th, but not by August 1st.

I'll work on getting more solid information this week.

I'm thinking more in terms of alpha, not the beta or final release form anticipated by the original seat-of-the-pants schedule put together by Ben.  I do think that "many packages available in beta" will be true by August 31, but probably not "many packages available in final release".  Will depend in part on how long we choose to beta test, and how stringent we are in our definition of "final release" (more stringent than aD has been in the past, if I get my way).

But given that the core's taking longer than first expected I guess we're doing OK.  The key is that the core pieces needed for basic package porting has been done for quite some time so package porting hasn't had to wait even though there's still work to be done on the core.

And we've had a higher degree of parallel development than I, at least, had first planned on.  In other words, more volunteers stepped to the plate than expected.  Hooray!

But keep in mind that some of these ports are going to need improvement, if nothing else because they're based on ACS 4.x Classic packages that need improvement, in some cases to work with core changes that are being made or discussed in order to get some of the unfinished pieces working in PG.  Sitewide search, that must at minimum provide an API that can be used for both InterMedia and our PG full-text search solution, will undergo changes that will impact client packages.

Paying the price of clean, multi-db support, in other words ...

Still, I think things are really going quite well.

There hasn't been work done on this yet, no.  We've just been porting stuff, making local improvements to packages like the CR, the messaging stuff etc but not adding new sets of pages like is needed for administrators.

Unless a bunch of new volunteers show up in a hurry, we've got to get by with the volunteers we have.  A couple of people e-mailed me offers of help this week, but I don't expect our volunteer base to grow much beyond where it is in the near term.

As people get freed up after porting packages I would hope that they'd  be available to take on major improvement tasks like the admin stuff you mention.  It's crucial stuff.