Forum OpenACS Forum Summaries: OpenACS Ad-hoc Core Team Summary for 18 March 2005

Collapse
1: OpenACS Ad-hoc Core Team Summary for 18 March 2005
Posted by Joel Aufrecht on 03/18/05 06:44 PM
Joel, Don, Jeff, DaveB stumbled into a meeting on accident.

Discussed:

  1. startup and keepalive. We agreed that moving away from daemontools to an init script approach was a good idea, because it is more standard (not discussed, but also a good reason: it lowers the barrier to installation). We agreed that this should come from aolserver, not from openacs. we agreed that Dossy should do it, but Dossy left before this agreement was made, so it's probably not very binding. This initiative will remain stalled until we can engage someone in the aolserver dev base to lead it.

    Jeff also noted that different distros require different scripts. We prioritized red hat, debian, and suse as OpenACS's likely needs.

    We agreed that keepalive should be made easier to use by incorporating it into a production mode switch - see next item.

  2. Production Mode. We agreed that Joel will TIP a proposal to add Production Mode to the config.tcl script. Production mode should be a single setting (perhaps, instead of production mode t/f, it could be mode: test|dev|production|repository) which triggers many changes, including normal email operation instead of emailing to log; activating keepalive; ratchet down logging verbosity; possibly other things, such as backup?)
  3. Branching for 5.2. We agreed that we shouldn't branch 5.2 until we have a working test server, preferably hosted at furfly. Don is following up with Furfly to see if they can loan an additional host, which we can later ask the .LRN consortium to fund. Meanwhile Dave will try to set up an automated test server on cvs.openacs.org. We won't branch 5.2 until we have a working test server which automatically installs HEAD and passes all of the automated tests.
Collapse
2: Re: OpenACS Ad-hoc Core Team Summary for 18 March 2005 (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 03/19/05 12:45 PM
For the init script based approach for starting up AOLserver, SourceForge FR# 746579 Server instance controller process would be quite useful.

On a "Production mode" setting in config.tcl, that sort of thing is pretty easy, I do it all the time. (I don't see why it requires a TIP, though.) Probably more involved than implementing it is deciding exactly how you want it to work. Personally, I key my Production vs. Development vs. Staging servers off of the directory name where OpenACS is located, e.g. /web/mysite-dev/ vs. /web/mysite-prod/. That way it is entirely automatic, no editing of code required. But perhaps the rest of you want a different system.