Forum OpenACS Development: Re: xowiki crashes

8: Re: xowiki crashes (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 10/13/06 01:08 PM

Gustaf,

Why is "Naviserver" working outside the rest of AOLserver community? There isn't any reason that work can't be done in the AOLserver CVS. If you ask for commit, you get it, that is historically what I have seen.Also have they actually released someting? Let's remember most people want software that works, not that is a changing target.

I just see this as one of the big problems with OpenACS overall. Unfinished work, some code is frm CVS, some from different places, etc. Perhaps we should package our own AOLserver too? What is a solution to make it simple and easy to install? Whatever we have right now is wrong.

I see it as a problem that our documentation says to get ns_cache from CVS. Except for xowiki, there was never a reason to get it frm CVS. The only change is the tiny one to support the pattern argument. That is incredibly easily worked around using lsearch. I seriously doubt there is any real performance difference between using lsearch and the search ns_cache does.

I guess this is a different discussion, I hope Jon can get his site working correctly, and I am sorry I don't know what the answer is to his problem.

9: Re: xowiki crashes (response to 8)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 10/13/06 02:16 PM

Concerning the naviserver: yes, it is a pity, it went this way. I have high respect for the naviserver developers, they had good reasons for doing this. Things look different, if your companies product depend on low-level functionality of the server. Btw, Their latest release is 4.99.1.

concerning ns_cache: if one has to iterate over a couple of hundred entries in tcl, this is certainly slower than doing this in C. For the same reason, many tcl commands (array, info vars/commands...) have a pattern argument. For toy installations, you are right, the difference won't be noticed.
It is no rocket science to program around this problem (used so far only on two places), and it should be possible to use the c-version where available and the tcl version, where not. however, i would think, upgrading the debian distro would be even less work.

I do not believe, that Jon's problem is related with ns_cache.

10: Re: xowiki crashes (response to 8)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 10/13/06 03:39 PM

Dave, the unreliabilty of software packages, downloads, CVS on sourceforge and so on resulted in me packaging up AOLserver4.5 with an install.sh which sets up everything for OpenACS. It includes unreleased code, but if noone is going to officially release it then it is better to use the code (especially if proven to work) then not.