Dear all,
the acs-messaging package currently belongs to the core packages and is therefore part of every OpenACS installation.
This package defines a data model for messages that it hierarchical (e.g. messages belong to some "thread", similar to the forums data model, which is fine in itself, however, this feature is not used by any of its current upstream dependencies (news and general-comments).
It also appears to define some scheduling and email sending logic, see for instance [1], which to me intersects with features provided by other packages such as acs-mail-lite or notifications.
It would be interesting to know from you out in the open if there are installations using this package and how. In case this was not so popular, we are discussing the idea of phasing it out. The plan would consist in:
- Detaching general-comments and news from acs-messaging as a dependency, porting the relevant features into the packages themselves.
- Make acs-messaging a non-core package, e.g. one can uninstall it safely from an existing installation and won't be part of new fresh installations.
Regardless of the details, the package will not be changed significantly, so downstream packages that use it will still be able to do so.
Please feel free to comment or report your experience on this thread, we will proceed or not in a few months based on this discussion.
All the best
Antonio
[1] https://openacs.org/api-doc/proc-view?proc=acs_messaging_send_query&source_p=1
