Forum .LRN Q&A: dotLRN some basic questions.

Posted by Zachari Partridge on 06/04/02 08:45 PM

Greetings,

I'm just getting tuned into the dotLRN project and had a few basic 
questions.  

1.) From the Installation 
instructions NEW! forums replaces bboard and sloan-bboard.  
After cvsing the dotlrn packages I don't see forums.  Where can I 
get it?  

2.) Also I'm a bit confused by the statement "Do not install or 
remove these packages since they conflict with dotlrn packages: 
      bboard (conflicts with sloan-bboard)
      portal (conflicts with new-portal)
      spam (conflicts with bulk-mail)"

Do I need a new installation that has never had bboard etc. 
installed to use the dotLRN package?


Thanks very much,

Zack.

2: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Zachari Partridge on 06/04/02 09:21 PM

Ok on 1.) OpenACS now cvses with forums. I had cvsed on 5/24/2002
previously and thats why I didn't have forums. Noticed that bboard
also still comes with the CVS of OpenACS.

3: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 06/07/02 03:03 PM

bboard will probably eventually be deprecated, due to its intrinsic datamodel problems, but will be continued in the tree until folks say it's OK to get rid of it. Since there are existing sites out there that use it, we'll probably keep it around for some time and folks may want to maintain it, too, until they can switch to the new forums (after the new forum package is done and people decide they like it, which we hope they will).

4: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Ben Adida on 06/07/02 10:32 PM

Zachari,

We should update our docs, because we no longer use sloan-
bboard, and forums doesn't conflict with the "normal" bboard
package from OpenACS.

That said, dotLRN is in alpha state. You shouldn't install it on
something that has existing "real" data.

5: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Benjamin Bytheway on 06/22/02 02:54 AM

How far along is development on the new forums package (for postgres)? This is somthing I definitely need in a site I'm getting ready to put together. Is there anything a moderately experienced ACS 4.x Classic user can help with (testing, etc.)?

6: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Yonatan Feldman on 06/22/02 02:58 AM

forums has already been ported to postgres. you can check it out from the head of the openacs cvs tree. it would be useful to get feedback after you have installed it and used it.

7: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Benjamin Bytheway on 06/22/02 04:21 AM

Since forums came from the dotLRN project, I followed the dotLRN installation instructions (all except for actually installing dotLRN). I checked out all the packages that were recommended from cvs, started installing and everything went fine until the apm got to the forums package, where I got:

psql:forums-forums-create.sql:56: ERROR:  Cannot insert a duplicate key into unique index acs_privileges_pk
psql:forums-forums-create.sql:90: ERROR:  Relation 'forums_forums' already exists
psql:forums-forums-create.sql:96: ERROR:  Relation 'forums_forums_enabled' already exists
psql:forums-forums-create.sql:117: ERROR:  Cannot insert a duplicate key into unique index acs_object_types_pk

    invoked from within
"db_source_sql_file -callback $callback $path/$file_path"
    (procedure "apm_package_install_data_model" line 32) ...

I'm going to try again and just install the, packages required to get forums up and running. If anyone can offer insight, I'd appreciate it.

I'm running aolserver 3.3ad13 and postgres 7.2.1 (which may be the problem) on Redhat 7.3.

8: Bug found. (response to 1)

Posted by Benjamin Bytheway on 06/22/02 06:12 AM

I should have looked closer at what was going on before I posted. It appears that forums-forums-create.sql is getting loaded twice. It is loaded once from the forums-create.sql script and then the apm is loading it a second time. I unchecked the forums-forums-create.sql file before I installed the package and it completed successfully.

Unforunately, I can't really test it from there because I think the cvs site-map is broken: I can't create new folders.

I'll update again once I can get a version of cvs that works.

9: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Yonatan Feldman on 06/22/02 11:01 PM

i have fixed site-map under postgres. update from the head to get the changes.

i also found out that the postgres port of forums is not working correctly yet. i will try to have an update to fix this today.

10: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Benjamin Bytheway on 06/22/02 11:14 PM

I've been trying to get this to work for the past little while and stumbled on to another openACS/Postgres bug.

This one is found in /packages/acs-kernel/acs-objects-create.sql

In the function acs_object__update_last_modified, the update statement reads:

update acs_objects
set acs_objects.last_modified = v_last_modified
where acs_objects.object_id = acs_object__update_last_modified__object_id;

This causes Postgres to give: ERROR: parser: parse error at or near "."

The correct statement should be:

update acs_objects
set last_modified = v_last_modified
where object_id = acs_object__update_last_modified__object_id;

(Let me know where else I should post this bug.)

11: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Yonatan Feldman on 06/22/02 11:26 PM

i was committing this as you posted :) still chasing down a few other bugs.

12: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Benjamin Bytheway on 06/24/02 11:40 PM

Found some more Postgres bugs in the forums package I just checked out of cvs:

in /www/index-postgres.xql the following column needs to be added to the query:

case when last_modified > (now() - 1) then 't' else 'f' end as new_p

----

in /www/forum-view-postgresql.xql the line:

select count(fm1.*)

should be changed to:

select count(*)

in both queries.

----

in /sql/postgresql/forums-messages-package-create.sql the line:

select define_function_args ('forums_message_new' ...

needs to be:

select define_function_args ('forums_message__new' ...

----

Forums is not working after these changes, but we're closer. The bug I'm currently trying to track down is in the plpgsql function: forums_mess_insert_tr, which gives an error:

ERROR:  FOR UPDATE: relation "max_child_sortkey" not found in FROM clause

Anyway, that's my update.

13: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Yonatan Feldman on 06/25/02 12:15 AM

it sounds like we are doing some duplicate work. i have fixed those errors already (check cvs) and some stuff in notifications.
some stuff is not working correctly yet, specifically sort_keys but i am trying to figure it out. i am still trying to learn postgres
so please bear with me.

14: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Benjamin Bytheway on 06/25/02 03:01 AM

I guess I should just be patient and wait for you to finish the fixes. I just wasn't sure if you were still working on them from Saturday since I hadn't seen a post. Anyway, I don't think it was wasted effort because I'm becoming more familiar with how the toolkit is put together.

Just let me know if there is anything I can do to help that isn't stepping on your toes. :)

15: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Benjamin Bytheway on 06/26/02 11:50 PM

Just checked out the latest openacs cvs just to make sure I'm not asking about something that's already fixed.

From last night on, the notifications package bombs on installation (Postgres). I don't know if you have a fix coming, so I just thought I'd make sure you knew about it.

Also, I have a question about permissions. When I was playing around with the forums package yesterday (which mostly worked.) I was confused about the permissioning system the forums use. If I, in the site map, give my the public the forum_read privelege in a certain instance of the forum package, do the individual forums and messages inherit this permission?

Yesterday it didn't look like the permissions were being inherited, so each forum had to have forum_read granted to the public explicitly. I hope that was just a bug and not the way it is supposed to work.

16: Response to dotLRN some basic questions. (response to 1)

Posted by Yonatan Feldman on 06/27/02 01:02 AM

thanks for the heads up benjamin. we are aware of these issues and are working to resolve them in the next few days. we are adding code to allow email replies to notifications and that is what broke the postgres install. we will port when we finish it.