Forum .LRN Q&A: what is the roadmap for .LRN?

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Posted by Peter Marklund on
I am interested in knowing about the plans for .LRN concerning:

* Releases of .LRN with corrsponding upgrade scripts. When will the
first release be? What will be the frequency of releases?

* Documentation. What documentation is planned for, when will it be
published?

* What are the outstanding (planned) features of .LRN and what are the
release dates of those features? This question is related to my
question about releases.

If we can achieve greater transparency in the planning for .LRN I
think this would be greatly appreciated in the community.

Thanks!

/Peter

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Posted by Don Baccus on
These are issues that the Technical Advisory Board will have to wrestle with, and sure, I have no problem with their being some level of transparency in the planning and in fact I welcome suggestions.

Ben is on vacation and until he returns we can't determine who from Open Force will be on the Technical Advisory Board.  The TAB hasn't really done anything yet, partly because of Ben's being gone and partly because I've been extremely busy these past two weeks.

We can't really release an official version of dotLRN until there's an official release of OpenACS 4 for it run on.  Thus the importance of driving OpenACS 4.6 out the door.  This also means we have a little breathing space for planning the first release of dotLRN.

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Posted by Peter Marklund on
Don, thanks, the dependency on the next OpenACS release is a good point.

One of the primary reasons I am bringing this up is that when you are talking to customers it would be embarrassing if you can't give even ball park figures to answer these questions (i.e. releases, docs and feature plan will be there in 1 or 3 or 5 or ... months).

I am sure there are some plans for dotLRN, I just don't think they are being communicated.

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Well ... I don't know of any such plans that aren't being communicated, but then again this whole governance issue sort of cascaded down out of nowhere from my personal point of view.  I don't claim to be entirely on top of the situation at this point in time.

Open Force has, in the past, set out some target dates for an "official" release but I don't know where we stand on those.  Perhaps Yon or Arjun can give us an idea of what OF has had in mind as a release roadmap?

I'm afraid we're going to be kinda stuck on this until Ben returns, though...

Our goal should be obvious - "first release ASAP after OpenACS 4.6 releases".  I just have no way to plug in numbers at this point.

Note that 4.6 will include many pieces that are critical to dotLRN, i.e. new-portals and other packages like notifications and attachments and the new forums software, plus the improved calendar package.

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Posted by Talli Somekh on
I know that documentation has been on the minds of the dotlrn and OF folks for a long time. I feel strongly that they've been trying to get to it but are really swamped.

Documentation is perhaps the most critical item after the code itself, I agree. I can't really blame OF though since they've been overwhelmed with work. Perhaps now that the system is generally available the community can put together an effort to begin laying groundwork for this?

Especially since the OACS documentation effort is beginning to pick up steam as well. Can we throw this on Roberto's back too? ;)

I only ask because I think it's important to be sensitive to OF's (and all the dotlrn players) deadlines and priorities.

talli

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Posted by Don Baccus on
All true, but again ... my presumption is that Ben's the decision-maker at OF, and Ben's on vacation for another week and a half...
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Posted by Alfred Essa on
Sorry but we are waiting for Ben to return from vacation and decide how OpenForce wants to participate. We are all in agreement that we need to clarify the "roadmap" for .LRN.