Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS 4.5 Release Date

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/06/02 08:15 PM

I would like to propose that I target May 15th - yes, 2002, not 2003 or 2004 - as the release date for OpenACS 4.5.

How do people feel about this?

Before releasing I would make a final swing through patch submissions, applying those that appear to be straightforward and of course testing them afterwards.

We know that

There are bugs
We've had less formal testing that we'd like
There are serious admin UI issues
There are still probably instances of slow permissions checks

and on and on but the bottom line is that what we've got is stable enough that the webhackers among us who support commercial clients are using it successfully as is. Both the PG and Oracle versions.

Comments?

2: Response to OpenACS 4.5 Release Date (response to 1)

Posted by Jon Griffin on 05/06/02 08:52 PM

Sounds good.

If we wait until the system is perfect it will never get released. Also, please remember the upgrade scripts.

3: Response to OpenACS 4.5 Release Date (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/06/02 11:04 PM

I don't *think* there are any changes in the post-beta path to table structures that will bite people. My changes to the creation of acs-subsite groups was to the Tcl client code. Vinod's supplying a datamodel patch to a PL/pgSQL function that you don't really need to grab unless you've been bit by it (and he's providing an upgrade script to drop/recreate the function).

So I *think* we're in good shape in this regard. It is possible some changes were missed, though. If so we'll want to try to provide upgrade scripts as we run into such problems.

4: Response to OpenACS 4.5 Release Date (response to 1)

Posted by defunct defunct on 05/07/02 11:55 AM

I'm inclined to agree, although I'm not sure there's really been as much testing as might be ideal...

Could I suggest that this release, as it will essentially be a production release, only include those packages that are stable enough? I think we'd all agree some packages are just not up to scratch, and perhaps it would be better to leave these in a *beta* download area, so people could get them separately. This would leaves a cleaner, more stable core, and thus a better overall impression.

Simon

5: Response to OpenACS 4.5 Release Date (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/07/02 01:44 PM

I think I'd rather tackle this last issue through documentation and somewhat thorough release notes. This is largely a logistical issue since this particular release is going to be a monolithic tarball. At least, I don't have the time to organize anything like a split into "the best" and "the rest" tarballs.

Would that be OK? If we had our new site up with the smart download package available we could painlessly split things up in the repository in a sensible way ...