Forum OpenACS Q&A: Howto setup openacs 4.5 / aolserver 3.4.2 / postgres 7.2 on SuSE 8.0 for german correctly?

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1: Howto setup openacs 4.5 / aolserver 3.4.2 / postgres 7.2 on SuSE 8.0 for german correctly?
Posted by Michael Schlenker on 09/18/02 05:43 PM
Hi,

i tried setting up OpenACS 4.5 from the tarball / from cvs HEAD.

Using:
PostgreSQL 7.2, rebuild from SuSE rpm with --enable-multibyte
--enable-locale --enable-unicode-conversion
AOLServer 3.4.2 (from the SuSE 8.0 rpm)
added:
postgres.so
nsxml.so
nsopenssl.so
nssha1.so
nsrewrite.so
nscache.so

After quite some time i got aolserver up and running, using a nsd.tcl
modelled after the openacs one. Even ssl worked, so i was happy. No
major problems so far.

Then began the adventure to foreign lands... Installing OpenACS 4.5.
After repeating the installation about 5 times i realized that umlauts
are not supported by the installer in all places (Aaargh), and there
is no error message, it just continues and breaks things (like the
"yourdomain.com" anywhere if using umlauts in one of the site-info
forms...
I saw all the installable packages and was pleased, there seemed to be
lots of good stuff. Until i tried to use things...

First tried Calendar. Looked very nice, but even inserting a single
item failed (0or1row failed and some pretty huge stacktrace...), hmm,
maybe because i use pgsql 7.2. ..., maybe other modules work better.

Then tried some of the other modules (encountered a bug / error
message in every module i tried to use...), so i was quite dissapointed.

Read up some postings here, about problems with 7.2, so tried one of
the nigthly cvs checkouts, an was pleased that it worked slightly
better, but none the less i found it quite unusable.

Trying to use german umlauts and using postgres seems like a heavily
mined territory for me (never had such massive problems with pure tcl
or any other tcl 8.3x using software).

I'm slowly coming to the impression that i try the impossible in
getting an OpenACS where not every module i want to use throws sql
errors more often than not, umlauts work in very selected places (for
instance in text bodies, but not in titles), items can not be deleted
anywhere, and various other things.

So my questions:
Is there anyone using a similar setup that works, or how do i set it
up correctly?

What is the state of i18n / l10n support for OpenACS 4.5 and upcoming
4.6 ?
Where can i find docs about it?

Where can i report bugs and for what version (the 4.5 tarball , the
cvs version)?

Is 4.5/4.6 on postgres considered to be in an experimental state or
can it be used for something working? I really like what i saw, but
most of the promising first looks and my expectations have been
dissapointed..., can anyone help me to keep up my good faith that
OpenACS is a good system. I'm in doubt a bit, at the moment.

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2: Response to Howto setup openacs 4.5 / aolserver 3.4.2 / postgres 7.2 on SuSE 8.0 for german correctly? (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 09/18/02 06:42 PM

Michael,

here is info on the release date of 4.6 (there is a lot going on in the source because of it):
https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0006Cv

and although i18n support is present in OpenACS (e.g. Greenpeace is in the process of moving all international sites over to OpenACS) it is more work than it should be, but work has just started to clean everything up
http://www.collaboraid.biz/extranet/i18n/ (but do not expect it in 4.6).

As far as getting umlauts to work this thread might help you out:
https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0003jQ

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3: Response to Howto setup openacs 4.5 / aolserver 3.4.2 / postgres 7.2 on SuSE 8.0 for german correctly? (response to 1)
Posted by Vadim Makarov on 09/19/02 11:19 PM
To get accented characters to work, your database should be initialized in an encoding that supports them (preferably in UNICODE). If it's currently in wrong encoding, you can dump the database, delete it, re-initialize it in UNICODE, and restore from the dump (warning: dump-restore procedure in 4.5. requires a couple of patches during restore phase to work correctly; search the forum).

If this doesn't fix it, try also to apply the patches at ...packages/acs-lang/ACS4.1b-PATCHES/

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4: Response to Howto setup openacs 4.5 / aolserver 3.4.2 / postgres 7.2 on SuSE 8.0 for german correctly? (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Schlenker on 10/12/02 07:56 PM
Just took another take at setting up the system.

First thing i did, was patching the SuSE 8.0 included Aolserver SRPM with the ad13 patches from sourceforge. The patches are incomplete and have to be adjusted a little bit to work with rpm. As far as encodings are concerned, iso-8859-10, iso-8859-13, iso-8859-14 and iso-8859-15 are missing in the nsd/conn8.c. Just adding them to the lookup table there is enough to get everything working. If tcl encodings are installed, that is.
Copying or symlinking the tcl8.3 lib from my tcl8.3.4 installation to the lib dir of aolserver home fixed this problem, so the encodings were found. Why isn't this documented anywhere prominently (outside the sourcecode), i wondered...
Result is a nice little aolserver RPM for suse 8.0 with all the goodies (nsopenssl-2.1, nsxml, nscache, nssha1, nsrewrite, openacs postgres driver), but not fully polished yet (if anyone is interested drop me a mail) and without the encodings (as SuSE 8.0 ships with tcl8.3.4 a simple link to /usr/lib/tcl8.3 is enough to get them).

Setting up nsd.tcl with iso-8859-15 charset was simple after that, following the various HackContentType and charset messages in the bboard here.
In nsd.tcl
set charset iso-8859-15
ns_section/nsparameters
ns_param URLCharset $charset
ns_param OutputCharset $charset
ns_param HackContentType true

Default SuSE postgres doesn't like unicode and multibyte, so i switched multibyte on in the .spec file for postgres and recompiled the srpm. No problem, just changing one single line in the spec.
(line 36) %define enable_mb 1
rebuild with rpm -ba postgresql.spec
Thats all.

Now i checked out OpenACS 4.6 branch from cvs with:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@openacs.org:/cvsroot -roacs-4-6 checkout openacs-4

Now finally i ran the OpenACS Installer and was positivly surprised, that everything went well. No problems, no hangs, nothing. Smooth as it should be. Good work.

Looking at the packages i wanted to use, i was positivly surprised that nearly all bugs i encountered before were gone. Some nasty little bugs remain, but I'm sure those get stomped out sometime in the future. (mainly in the survey package (delete), one in the bug tracker with the subscribe button, Bookmarks with deleting after link check, mostly minor stuff...)

I can say I'm rather pleased with the result, but hate the boulders, that blocked the path. Documentation is incomplete (where isn't it) and RTFS isn't really a premium option with OpenACS most of the time (compared to reading the excellent tcl/tk -core source code for information, which is more like a pleasure).

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5: Response to Howto setup openacs 4.5 / aolserver 3.4.2 / postgres 7.2 on SuSE 8.0 for german correctly? (response to 1)
Posted by Tilmann Singer on 10/13/02 10:57 PM
Where can i report bugs...?

In case you haven't found out yourself already in the meantime: OpenACS SDM.

And for bug-tracker: Bug Tracker Bugs.