not sure, what you mean by "heroism" and "keeping alive", but according to our download statistics [1], OpenACS 5.8.0 is doing very well (in 3 weeks more than 7.500 downloads, this are more than the total number of downloads of OpenACS 5.4.0, 5.4.1, 5.4.2, 5.4.3, 5.5.0, 5.5.1). OpenAcs is doing quite well. Since we use OpenACS in large production environments, we have certainly interest on a good code quality.
Concerning bugs etc.: The most important contribution of OpenACS 5.8.0 are that it runs on pg 9.2+ without any necessary configuration changes, and it runs efficiently also on large sites (using e.g. recursive queries for permissions). Before that, large sites had to use pg 8.3, which is already at EOL. Without the change, OpenACS would have been doomed on the longer range.
Concerning pg-versions: we run the regression tests (automated testing on acs-core) on the following pg releases: 8.4.16, 9.0.10, 9.1.5, 9.2.3, 9.2.4, all with the same results (8 errors in spell-check, complains about non-configured spellcheck, an entry about this is active in the bug tracker) and two complaints from acs-authentication (auth_password_recover, auth_password_retrieve; tries to send mail, which is on the test machines not configured). As i wrote earlier, these are exactly the same errors we were seeing with OpenACS 5.6.0 and 5.7.0 ... and now with pg 9.3.0.
The regression test does certainly not cover all of OpenACS. Here are two more figures concerning bug fixing that one might find interesting:
- this year, so far 78 bugs from the bug-tracker were fixed/resolved/closed, this is more than the sum from the previous 4 years (between 5 and 20 per year)
- OpenACS.org runs the freshest code from the oacs-5-8 branch and uses not only acs-core, but as well several packages, in which we fixed many bugs not contained in the bugtracker. These changes led to much lower numbers of error entries in the error.log: 100 days ago (using aolserver + OpenACS 5.5 + pg 8.3.5) we saw abut 17.000 errors per day, last week, we were at 3000, yesterday at 428 (many of the remaining errors are from from invalid urls, etc.). Several bugs were site-related and a single bug could cause many errors/day, but we are feeding all changes back to the oacs-5-8 branch. Eventually this branch will comes out as a OpenACS 5.8.1 release (don't ask me when).
hope, this helps
-gn
[1] https://openacs.org/projects/openacs/download/
