Forum OpenACS Development: OpenACS: the core and the packages/plugins

Dear all,
first of all my best wishes for the new year; I wish all you endurance, strength, health, and as much happiness as these times can allow.

I was about to continue the discussion on https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=5508475, but eventually I decided to start a new one.

Imagine a new potential user is interested in adopting OpenACS as base for the development of its applications. Should she use version 5.9 and then change everything when OpenACS goes to version 5.10; or should she use version 5.10 and take on her own the burden to verify that all packages in which she's interested work as expected?

I got from Fisheye, from the branch oacs-5-10 (https://fisheye.openacs.org/browse/~br=oacs-5-10/OpenACS/openacs-4/packages) the OpenACS core, and yet packages "search" and "tsearch2-driver" as they are do not work (on Windows only or also on Linux?). I made them work on my Windows distro and I will post my fixes on "Bug Tracker".
On top of that as soon as I added an "external" package, e.g. Contacts , it didn't work either because of the "acs_rel_type__create_type" issue, or because it uses some deprecated functions or because its SQL calls do not work any longer on PostreSQL 13.1.

Anyhow, I'm currently taking some selected (by a customer) packages and making them work on my Windows distribution on top of Version 5.10 and I'll make all of this available as my "standard" Windows distribution.

Hopefully this effort will also be useful to some other people/organizations.

Again my best wishes to all of you,
Maurizio

Hi Antonio,
I was trying to get a working set of packages on Windows and Maurizio was debugging/fixing the things I was running into. I am new to OpenACS and am trying to work my way through the maze of historical packages to find the functions I need. In the case of Contacts, I just need a place to store information (phone numbers, emails, roles, etc) about people related a community and Contacts looked like a likely candidate. If that is not the package that is kept up to date, which package(s) do OpenACS communities use to store basic contact information?

Thank you in advance.
Carl

Hi Antonio,
What I'm looking for is just basic contact information storage. It would be similar to the data that is stored in pretty much every email program and every mobile phone these days so I was expecting it would be data that most online communities needed to store. I'd be happy to share any fixes that I fund and those fixes would come through Maurizio since I'm still too new to OpenACS to attempt any change myself.
Regards,
Carl

Dear Brian,
the Contacts package relies on AMS.

Thank you,
Maurizio

Dear Antonio,
my replies here below.

I have answered on the bug-tracker about tsearch.
[MM] More on this later, where you talk about "rules of tumb".

Regarding the "Contacts" package, this and some of its many dependencies are not among the packages we actually maintain. I am courious on whether you just tried this one package randomly or if you need it in your project.
[MM] Carl, my customer, already answered. We're looking for a Contacts package, and it seemed to me that "contacts" was the best available option,

However, this commit https://cvs.openacs.org/changelog/OpenACS?cs=MAIN%3Aantoniop%3A20210103153317 should improve the situation. There is still a lot of deprecated api in there and I am not really sure about the many "US-oriented" packages it requires, but better than just breaking at install time.
[MM] These are exactly the very same fixes I applied to the package, to make it work.

As a rule of thumb, is always better to provide detailed information about the problem at hand, rather than just dropping the "It's broken!" bomb. All the packages currently in the oacs-5-10 branch are maintained and do work to their capacity (save the occasional bug), so I suspect there to be an explanation for your issues that has something to do with the specifics of a Windows setup.
[MM] Well... well...
Given this piece of code
if {[callback::impl_exists -impl $driver -callback search::driver_info]} {
array set info [lindex [callback -impl $driver search::driver_info] 0]
# array set info [list package_key intermedia-driver version 1 automatic_and_queries_p 1 stopwords_p 1]
} else {
array set info [acs_sc::invoke -contract FtsEngineDriver -operation info -call_args [list] -impl $driver]
}

if { [array get info] eq "" } {
ns_return 200 text/html [_ search.lt_FtsEngineDriver_not_a]
ad_script_abort
}
The initial if passed OK, but then the following statement did not work, so I got the error displayed by
ns_return 200 text/html [_ search.lt_FtsEngineDriver_not_a]

If you check my fix, I forced the execution of
array set info [acs_sc::invoke -contract FtsEngineDriver -operation info -call_args [list] -impl $driver]
and then that piece of code "worked".

Exactly the same behaviour and consequent reasoning for the following piece of code:

if {[callback::impl_exists -impl $driver -callback search::search]} {
# DAVEB TODO Add subsite to the callback def?
# FIXME do this in the intermedia driver!
# set final_query_string [db_string final_query_select "select site_wide_search.im_convert(:q) from dual"]

array set result [lindex [callback -impl $driver search::search -query $q -offset $offset -limit $limit \
-user_id $user_id -df $df \
-extra_args [list package_ids $search_package_id object_type $object_type]] 0]
} else {
array set result [acs_sc::invoke -contract FtsEngineDriver -operation search \
-call_args $params -impl $driver]
}

When "search" got fixed this way, the system was looking for a tsearch2::search implementation
which as you saw I provided into "tsearch2-driver"

I'm not sure this is a specific Windows problem, it looks to me as code that needs some restructuring.
Frank and Malte stumbled on the very same problems and they are not working on Windows
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=5465077

I have a contacts package that I wrote long ago for a client. It should be fairly international, but it is from 2000 or so right after I worked for ArsDigita. If you are interested in looking at it, let me know. You will need to update it, but it should be fairly easy.

I also wrote the Reference Data packages originally and believe that I used them on contacts-lite (what I called the package).

I don't use OACS at all anymore except for one client who is moving away after 21 years to another system.

Hi Jon!

Nice to hear from you! Do you have your package somewhere on a public repository? If not, please send it to me.... it would be nice to have your package on the list of OpenACS packages in the public repository.

We have currently just 100 packages maintained. Would you have the resources to maintain your package further? But even if not, having this package would be a useful resource.

all the best
-g

Hi Jon,
If the offer to provide the contacts-lite package is still open I would like to evaluate it for my project. It did not take me long to figure out that using the Contacts package will be a burden I can't afford.

I'll document the issues I found with the Contacts package here for anyone else who might be evaluating it in the future:

Contacts Package Issues in 2021
Changes were required just to install it and those changes were made by others. But, after it was installed, I found:

1. It pulls in an additional 5 packages that are not on the 5.10 branch (AMS, Postal-Address, Telecom-Number, Organization, and Mail-Tracking). As Gustaf pointed out, Contacts and those packages will need to be maintained by the project using them. In my case 49 out of the 50 other packages I think I need are all on the 5.10 branch already so adding 6 unmaintained packages would be a burden.

2. There are a large number of configurable parameters and some of them point to folders and portlet files used to build the UI. As installed, the referenced folders do not exist so the data is not always displayed. The help text for the parameters is not helpful in determining what folders these parameters should reference now.

3. Going through the screens to figure it out, some screens of data can't be submitted because of missing data. Attempting to add the missing data through other screens can throw errors. These may be due to item 2 above but maybe not.

4. Adding a person through AMS breaks the Members package.

5. Everything is based on flexible lists of parameters in AMS but understanding the intent of the lists is not easy since language translation keys are missing so the names of the list are somewhat obfuscated.

I'm guessing no one is interested in these. I will hold on the the tarballs for a bit, but no guarantees of when I may just do a cleanup.

Jon, i just missed your posting due to the stupid tree display. As mentioned above, please send the tar ball to me via mail, or put it one some public server where i can access it.

Many thanks!

Dear Gustaf,
I got the point of the criticality of this issue.
I'm currently investigating it and I will come back to you and Antonio as soon as I have something.

BTW: I don't manage to login in "fisheye" and whenever I try to download something that is larger than more or less 3.2 Mb the zip file I receive is corrupted. Could you please help me on this.

Thank you,
Maurizio

Dear Gustaf,
don't bother, I thought that by logging in you could have more features, less restrictions; I'll use CVS.

Maurizio

Dear Gustaf and Antonio,
I finally found the issue that prevented the Search from working.
My bad, I had a misaligned configuration with some packages not working properly. Getting everything using CVS fixed the issue.
Now I have a further problem: if I add something like a comment, a post in a forum and the like, it appears in the search. If I create a new page in Xowiki, its contents do not appear in the search. What am I doing wrong?

Thank you in advance,
Maurizio

The pages are are added to the indexer queue each time these are updated. So you might have to edit the page. Otherwise on has to use "reindex", as Iuri mentioned, which produces for every published page an entry in the seach-queue.

After editing a page, the content is added to the search-queue, which is processed every minute. If there is a problem with indexing, you should see a message in the error.log from this step.

This is not related. Maybe, you restarted the server, after activating search or similar.

Dear all,
I would like to thank you all of you for your contributions.
Thanks to your help now my Windows-OpenACS distribution, available at https://spazioit.com/pages_en/sol_inf_en/windows-openacs_en/, contains a working oacs-5-10 OpenACS.
Thank you,
Maurizio

The "bug-tracker" instannce on openacs.org is a package from the HEAD branch and it works with acs-core from oacs-5-10; Most of the package at openacs.org are from the oacs-5-10 branch.

Maurizio: Have you seen: https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/bug?f_component=56206&format=table&f_state=7&bug_number=3371&project_id=56106 ?

This sounds related.

Concerning bug tracker workflows: The intended workflow is as follows:

Some user A opens an issue, many people can comment, the maintainer M should resolve the issue, then A should either close or reopen it. It can also be reopened later.

Design: https://openacs.org/doc/bug-tracker/bug-tracker-spec