Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: permission problem with head.

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Posted by Bjorn Thor Jonsson on
No one's expecting to be able to run a production site from HEAD at the moment I hope.
In fact I'm just about to put a site into production that's based on HEAD, last checkout 2003-03-07.

The main reason for using head is the cool i18n capability, makes more sense to use it rather than to hardcode translations in the .adp files (will contribute is_IS catalog files when I finish translating, or sooner if anyone wants what I already have).

The site does not use dotLRN, just plain OpenACS plus a custom package (which I'd like to contribute when I've generalized it a bit; it offers email subscriptions to RSS feeds and currently has a hardcoded interface in Icelandic, a bit similar to Simon's News Aggregator).

I know HEAD is not as safe as a numbered release, but am I making a seriously bad descision?

After last merge there was some problem which I submitted to bugracker with a suggested fix. Things seem to be running nicely now and I don't think I'll merge with OpenACS HEAD again before going live. But will a non-acs-core hacker like me have trouble keeping up with head in the future?

Reading an entry in Peter Marklund's blog, Back on the Edge of OpenACS Development, made me a bit more confident going this way :)

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Posted by Jeff Davis on
I don't think it's too bad to build a site from HEAD if you are careful to keep a reference copy of the code (as a vendor branch or a tarball) so you could more easily merge what's coming. One thing that will happen in the not too distant future (when I free up a little or someone else steps up to the plate) is that we will merge all the 4.6 bug fixes over which would likely cover bugs on your own site.

That will be a lot of changes but hopefully not too many conflicts to resolve.

If you are patching bugs on your copy I would suggest you submit patches since if you do so, they will get applied to head and reduce the number of conflicts you will have to resolve yourself (this is a general suggestion to everyone, not you in particular :) )

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Posted by Bjorn Thor Jonsson on
Thanks, Jeff :)

I keep a local vendor branch and will be sure to test any merges on a separate checkout before updating the live checkout.

Uploaded a patch to that bug report now, just not sure if it's good for all usecases, haven't studied the changes to that proc well enough.