Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to ACS classic Tcl module repository up

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Posted by Ben Adida on
Peter,

I welcome all additional participation to the OpenACS
community, and, as it seems that Ybos is beginning to
participate, I'd like to say "Welcome." I can understand people's
concerns regarding your motivations given that your
contributions began only after ArsDigita's demise. In the end,
however, the open-source community works by judging your
actions. So welcome to OpenACS, and hope to see your team
contribute to the code in the near future.

In passing, I would like to correct some of the misinformation
present in your posts here and in other places.

OpenACS did not *begin* architecture last year. We began *
reviewing* and *improving* the existing ACS 4.2 architecture.
Don't forget that OpenACS started with ACS 4.2 as a base and
only improved from there. We've made many improvements in
the consistency of APIs, speed of many modules, database
compatibility. In fact, we made *certain* that we never took
functionality out of our code so that, at any point in time, our code
was always a superset of ACS 4.2 (in terms of functionality,
stability, and scalability). We worked hard on database
compatibility because it is a critical part of our project. We would
never have the thriving community we have without PostgreSQL
support.

We've also become more stringent about how we name our
releases. We refused to call our first release anything more than
an alpha, because we consider that the ACS 4.2 code as
delivered was pre-alpha, incomplete, very buggy, and lacking in
scalability. We took code that we improved from ACS 4.2, and
called it alpha. And we continually made it available over CVS.

The naming became more honest. The code only got better.
Wine doesn't have to be expensive or French to be good.

Now we're about to release a long-awaited beta. That's because
the code is far better than ACS 4.2: it contains large numbers of
bug fixes, speed improvements, and truly works on PG and
Oracle. We're psyched about it. And we look forward to your
contributions so that hopefully OpenACS can soon be Oracle 9i
compatible, on top of Oracle 8i and PostgreSQL.