Forum OpenACS Q&A: Any plans for a 4.6 announcement?

Posted by Reuven Lerner on 01/08/03 09:42 PM

So far as I can tell, the only people who know that 4.6 has been released are visitors to the front page of openacs.org, and perhaps the forums.

I haven't seen any announcements on Slashdot or the PostgreSQL lists. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

I also haven't seen a document that describes what has changed or improved from 4.5 to 4.6. Or how easy (or hard) it is to upgrade. Heck, even the docs on openacs.org are for 4.5.

I know that open-source projects put code ahead of hype, but this seems a bit extreme to me. Are there any plans for even a whimper of publicity?

2: Re: Any plans for a 4.6 announcement? (response to 1)

Posted by Jeff Davis on 01/08/03 09:48 PM

Are you volunteering to bang the drum?

3: Re: Any plans for a 4.6 announcement? (response to 1)

Posted by Reuven Lerner on 01/08/03 09:53 PM

I would be happy to volunteer, but I can't even think about it until the middle of next week. Between the flu, a newborn, a late LJ column, and "real" work, there's no way.

I expect that my life will be a bit more normal on Sunday or Monday of next week, at which point I'll be glad to work on such a release. (I'll need some serious input from core hackers, since I haven't paid much attention to 4.6 in CVS.)

4: Re: Any plans for a 4.6 announcement? (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 01/08/03 11:46 PM

Reuven,

To be honest, I learned that 4.6 had been released because I read about it in #openacs.

Tonight I will update the documents on openacs.org, and try to generate a changelog from the CVS changelog, at least for the kernel and major stuff.

I'd invite package owners to do the same (or something similar, just a bulleted list saying "in this release my package improved in this, this and that" would be enough )and send it to me, so I can add it to our "Changelog" page.

After I have that ready we can post it to other lists (PG, /., and maybe we could finally update our record at freshmeat).

-Roberto

5: Re: Any plans for a 4.6 announcement? (response to 4)

Posted by Jeff Davis on 01/08/03 11:55 PM

you can also get a list of bugs closed in sdm for 4.6 (although its not entirely accurate since some were dups
and some were fixed pre 4.6).

6: Re: Any plans for a 4.6 announcement? (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 01/09/03 06:52 AM

Well, I did some fixes to the Static Pages packages, so Roberto, here's my summary of improvments. Other people (jeffd, donb, daveb, olah) did stuff too, but I looked at the CVS log, and I think their stuff was either bug fixes that I assume weren't very user visible, or pre-dated the OpenACS 4.5 release entirely. (Obviously, correct me if I'm wrong folks...)

The spiffy new Static Pages 4.3 package, released in concert with OpenACS 4.6, has the following improvments from the version released with OpenACS 4.5:

Multiple static-pages package instances are now allowed - the package is no longer a singleton.
Added support for non-HTML MIME types, and now properly notes the MIME type in the the Content Repository. Tested (only) with HTML and PDF.
Added mutex locking, no more errors if by accident you run more than one sp_sync_cr_with_filesystem job at once.
Fixed sp_sync_cr_with_filesystem process so that the sync will properly continue after hitting an error on a single file, rather than terminating abruptly.
Added proc sp_sync_cr_with_filesystem_scheduled, which can be scheduled to run nightly.
Misc. bug fixes, code cleanup, and maintenance. (E.g., moved PL/SQL and pg/plsql functions and package bodies and headers into separate files, to make upgrade scripts simpler to write.)
Full upgrade scripts from OpenACS 4.5 Static Pages release.

7: Re: Any plans for a 4.6 announcement? (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 01/10/03 02:59 AM

First of all, yes, this is a great idea. I've walked quietly with the release because I wanted to make sure at least a few people were able to download and install it before being willing to believe we were finally at the "this will do for now" state.

If you and/or others in the community want to organize yourself to generate PRs and the like for not only this release but other significant events feel free to do so.

We move so slowly here that the workload wouldn't be overwhelming :) But it would be nice to have a cadre of people who are willing to routinely publish announcements to "all the right places" just as we have a cadre of folks involved with testing, documentation, and implementation.

For those worried that this reeks of the M(arketing) word, damned right, it does :) My advice - be happy, don't worry! The more people who know about us the more who are likely to join in, help out, and make all our lives easier.

8: Re: Any plans for a 4.6 announcement? (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 01/14/03 05:52 AM

I have updated the documents available ot openacs.org/doc/ to reflect the 4.6 release.

I have merged my changelog+release-notes++ stuff into Don's original release-notes.html. I didn't bother converting all that stuff to our docbook docs. It's a static copy.

The only packages which have changelogs (package maintainers: are you reading this forum??) are clickthrough, static pages, ticket-tracker-lite (whose owners/contributors send me the changelog) and e-commerce, which I generated the changelog for because I had done some commits there.

Now comes the time to post announcements to the usual sites. I'm trying to get the openacs record on freshmeat. Could anyone write a PR blurb to submit to these sites?

-Roberto