Forum OpenACS Q&A: aolserver distribution for OpenACS 4

Posted by Mat Kovach on 11/28/01 06:11 AM

http://uptime.openacs.org/aolserver-openacs

Currently this is a temporary location for my aolserver distributions.

To make a short story long, I've been looking to add some mime support
for webmail to aolserver mainly for OpenACS 4

I got a bit frustrated having to download source for the
installation so I packaged this up a bit. Basically I grapped
ArsDigita's AOLserver 3.3.1ad13 removed some of their stuff, modified
things a bit for my use. I added Jerry Asher's nsvhr patches,
modified tclUnixPipe.C (tcl8.3.2) so it would play nice with OpenBSD
(Should work on NetBSD and FreeBSD).

Also, I included nsxml and pgdriver-2.0.1 which should be everything
(Not including OpenFTS which I just remembered!) needed to get a
properly compiled AOLserver for running OpenACS.

It is very rough.

At the present time I have tested (okay, it compiled with out errors)
on Linux Redhat 7.1 and OpenBSD 2.8. I was able to install a CVS
export of OpenACS 4 using the OpenBSD binary.

If there is interest and people find it useful I'm willing to work on
it more, clean it up around the edges and hopefully make something
that will be useful for other binary distributions (It would be nice
to be able to build rpms, etc. from one spot).

If not, I'll just keep it there for me :)

/mek

2: Response to aolserver distribution for OpenACS 4 (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 11/28/01 06:10 PM

What did you remove from ad13 (and why)? Just curious.

We also have patches from Vinod for ns_uuencode that we need to bundle up.

I'm fairly well resigned to having to distribute an AOLserver3.3+ad13+OACS1 copy by the time we go "live" with our first real OpenACS 4 release.

What are the negative implications - if any - of including Jerry's stuff in a standard AOLserver release? Jerry? (in other words, is performance impacted for sites not using nsvhr?)

Is there anyone out there who'd like to take over the task of building a "best of" AOLserver3.3+patches release specifically for OpenACS users? Again ... Jerry? Do you have time? (Jerry has a lot of experience with AOLserver, thus the suggestion, but if anyone else wants to volunteer feel free!)

I also have a patched ora8.c that needs to be part of any AOLserver munged for OpenACS 4 use (the scheme browser won't work without it).

3: Response to aolserver distribution for OpenACS 4 (response to 1)

Posted by Mat Kovach on 11/28/01 07:20 PM

I didn't remove any of the AD patches, just some of there stuff in the arsdigita-aol3 directory (make-src-dist.sh, install-aolserver-binary, etc.) Stuff that I didn't find useful. I still use there patch. I jsut didn't see a need for them.

I've used Jerry's patches on quite a few boxes without problems and I don't see a problem with them (once again, this started as something for me). That said, I never look into what impact Jerry's pactches might have but I personally haven't seen any on the small sites I used it with.

IF there is a need for a "best of patches" for OpenACS I can take this and clean it up to create it. As I said this started as something for me (I have serveral source tree's like this). I'd be more than happy to create it to something useful for others.

If this is going to be for wide spread use I think I'd have one with "virtual hosting" and one without.

4: Response to aolserver distribution for OpenACS 4 (response to 1)

Posted by Jerry Asher on 11/28/01 09:12 PM

I apologize, but I definitely have no time at this moment, I'm always hoping to get others more interested in giving me a hand!

As to performance impact of including my work: none. If you're not using the nsunix nor nsvhr module, you've taken out 90% of the work I've done, and the rest are pretty innocuous patches. As to the reliability impacts of including my work: none I am aware of, especially if you aren't using the nsunix and nsvhr modules.