Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Request for Comments and Discussion: Building a Leaner, Meaner OpenACS with MIST

Thanks to everyone for posting their opinion. I encourage more people to post, even if their post is as simple as "I agree with person X." Jun, specifically, you have nothing to apologize for. I want to hear arguments from all sides.

A few responses:

• Don, Simon, Dan: I've had 4 people re-read this document with me. I've reread it myself 10 times at least. I don't mention anyone by name, I don't ever imply that anyone has done something wrong, I say that we are going down the wrong path. we includes me. This is not a criticism of anyone.

• Dan: the current OpenACS distribution is only getting bigger, with nothing ever being taken out. Both the core and the tarball. This is not opinion, this is fact. All you have to do is check the CVS. And since OF has contributed to this, I'm once again not accusing anyone, simply pointing out a fact and a potential solution.

• John: ideally this puts no more stress on developers than putting together a MIST script, as you said. But your worry is a good one, and we should keep that in mind if we move to actually planning development of MIST. If MIST ends up making developer life too complicated and user life only moderately better, then it's not worth it. Thanks for pointing this out!

• Andrew: right on! fancy-ui and simple-ui is exactly the kind of idea that I want to see with MIST. If people want portals-based UI, they should get it, but if it doesn't need to be imposed on everyone else, then why not make it modular?

• Simon: I think something like MIST would *help* on the testing front, meaning you could stagger testing of different packages and begin doing more unit testing instead of the monstrous integration testing you have to do every time. You're putting in an incredible amount of work to do this (and thank you!), which I think could be eased a bit.

• Simon: yes, currently, dotLRN has to be downloaded as one big tarball. Not because of dependencies (we've done the best we can to be as modular as possible), but because in a world without a MIST-like system, how else can we do it? That's why we're proposing MIST, so that people can use parts of dotLRN without downloading the whole tarball.

• Simon, again: context is important. From a technical standpoint, location of code shouldn't matter. From a management standpoint, it matters very much. MIST tries to make location unimportant so that management of code can be performed in whatever way the code's author prefers.

• Don: you say "there's no point in writing MIST if we can't gather the proper resources to properly manage module releases." I say there's no point in modularizing releases if we don't have an end-user tool like MIST to keep it simple (and even make it simpler) to install. This is what's worth discussing! Let's hash it out.

I'll try to summarize again the points here:

• yes, many people, including Don, Dan, myself, Simon, etc... have expressed the desire to move to decentralized packages. I don't question that.

• at the same time, we haven't really done anything about it to date. Discussion doesn't count as action. That's what I claimed in my proposal and what I continue to claim today.

• if we do something about it without something like MIST to make installation easier on the user end, then we will find ourselves with an even less usable system, or force users to resort to whole tarball downloading... in which case, what's the point?

Once again, I am not cricitizing anyone in particular. Check out the proposal again. I say "we". "We" are a community. "We" includes me and OpenForce. We're all in this together.