Dear all,
Since the early days, the OpenACS content repository supports blobs. Content items of storage type "lob" were used e.g. for user-portraits (and on a few other occasions). Since about 2006 new user-portraits are stored with the storage type "file" due to problems with the lob interface.
As we are running a large instance with a few thousand portraits stored in "lobs", i looked into the problem and fixed the issues visible to me. It looks to me as if the lob interface in the pg driver (nsdbpg) was just implemented for tcl 8.4, there were problems with storing the binary content, streaming the content, or returning the content, since a plain string based interface was used. Furthermore, PostgreSQL requires data of type "bytea" to be decoded with PQunescapeBytea(), which was as well missing in the driver. With these changes it is as well possible to get the lob data out of the system, or to convert it into items of storage type "file".
In case you have old portraits stored on OpenACS.org, these should show up no again (on the toolbar and on your /pvt/home page). If you want to use the fixed code in your installation, use the newest version of the oacs-5-9 channel, and wait for the release of NaviServer 4.99.9, which should be released soon.
