Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Summary of the Sloan - Berklee dotLRN meeting

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Posted by Don Baccus on
is there any case for essentially packaging OACS distributions in these formss, perhaps with more pre-configuration.
Yes. During earlier discussions (maybe more like 18 months ago! Long long ago!) about "vertical apps", the notion included packaging as well as branding.

In practice I think this can be handled by building a release tarball that includes the acs-core and needed packages, and the custom "vertical app" packages (dotLRN stuff, in this case). The package(s) providing the framework for the app would be flagged as "load at install time".

At that point, depending on the app, various approaches might be taken. For dotLRN you'd probably load all the dotLRN packages automatically at install time, and automount the basic framework packages (dotLRN itself, for instance) after restart. Then after a second restart you could jump right in, defining terms, departments, classes etc. Off you go! That's how I'd package it, anyway ... it can all be done with the APM in its current state without touching the core at all.

At least I think it can :)

It would make a hell of an onsite demo ... assuming you could keep your audience entertained during the lengthy "insert circus" called "ref-timezones" ...