I am going to respond to Bart's concerns. I know he is not the only one who has these concerns. My greatest problem with these type of complaints (and not Bart expressing them in particular) is that they only come out in a greater discussion of marketing, or why OpenACS doesn't have more developers. Why aren't these issues brought up individually in the forums, or as bug reports?
"Even installation of OpenACS core required patches to run on PostgreSQL 7.3, which by OpenACS's policy should be a supported version."
Interesting. Are these problems documented somewhere so that the community can act on them?
"After installation, tsearch2_driver required a patch to work with PG 7.3."
A patch to what? To tsearch2, postgresql, or the tsearch2-driver package. Its a new package, so it might have problems. Was a bug report posted?
"Lars-blogger fails when setting up blogs for several users."
Is this in the bugtracker?
"Compounded with administration navigation that appears to be designed without rhyme or reason was enough of an incentive to look for a different web development framework."
Was there a discussion about admin iterface problems? As far as I know, most people thought the interface was improved, but certainly had room for more improvement. Did you propose and ways the interface could be improved?
"...it is the fact that after all these years OpenACS still produces questionable releases, has outdated documentation, lacks comprehensive support for SOAP" Was there a volunteer to work on this?
"... relies on a legacy ecommerce solution with a fair share of warts (no offence Torben)" Was there a volunteer to write a new one? It is my understanding that people are using ecommerce in real web sites, so the perceived problems are not so great to stop anyone using it. Certainly it has not improved at the same rate as Amazon.com.
I encourage anyone to ask questions, post problems, and make suggestions! If necessary write a proposal, design a mockup for a new interface, write code. We have a pretty much open CVS repository now. Anyone who wants commit has been granted it. We know how to reverse commits if there is a problem. If anyone needs help in writing new documentation and getting it intergrated with the docbook version is offered assistance.
