Forum OpenACS Q&A: Why 7.2?

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1: Why 7.2?
Posted by Zach Beane on 03/01/02 06:39 PM
I noticed a lot of recent threads talk about how 7.2 is a necessity
for future development of OpenACS. What's changed in 7.2 that makes it
so important? The HISTORY file lists some cool things, but nothing
jumps out at me as essential.
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2: Response to Why 7.2? (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 03/01/02 09:22 PM
"Future development" means the release that will follow OpenACS 4.5, which will probably be some time in summer.

As to "why" it's pretty much the same reason as to why we no longer support PG 6.5.3 or PG 7.0 - the PG group doesn't support those versions, many bugs have been fixed that neither we nor they care to hear about any more, etc.  There's not much reason to support something PG won't support.

Likewise OpenACS 4.5 will require Oracle 8i, not 7, while we don't yet support 9i.

Software rolls on and it's unreasonably complex to try to support an endless list of bersions no longer supported by the tool vendors themselves!

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3: Response to Why 7.2? (response to 1)
Posted by Zach Beane on 03/01/02 09:25 PM
Thanks. I wasn't sure if it had to do with a specific technical issue, like the tuple size limit in past versions.
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4: Response to Why 7.2? (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 03/01/02 10:45 PM
No, as you noted there's nothing that sticks out as being a "whoa, we gotta have that!" feature in PG 7.2.

In the past we've usually based our work on early beta releases of PG.  It's a sign of PG's maturity that we've been sticking with PG 7.1 throughout this OpenACS 4.5 effort rather than dump it in favor of PG 7.2 ASAP.

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5: Response to Why 7.2? (response to 1)
Posted by Neophytos Demetriou on 03/01/02 11:22 PM
The new search package will require 7.2. tsearch is only available for 7.2.