Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Migrating OpenACS.org to a branch in the OpenACS repository

Andrew,

Actually, I am pretty sure Jeff actually suggested this a while back.

I think we want to use a branch, and not just run off of a tag, because openacs.org will have customized code. So we want to merge bug fixes in both directions. Right now we made some changes to the openacs.org code but were not easily able to merge those changes back to openacs.

So running off a branch of openacs should make it easier to make sure openacs.org is running the latest code as well as make it easy to merge in bug fixes, or merge fixes from openacs.org back to openacs.

I have the feeling that the decision tends to the branch strategy: create a branch of openacs-4 in CVS, called openacs.org for example, and initially make it a copy of oacs-4-6 HEAD, trying to stay as similar as possible to oacs-4-6. This would make it very easy to merge bug fixes in both directions and have a decent live demonstration of the toolkit.

Now how to get there from the current suggestion as quickly as possible? I would suggest to simply create the branch in CVS, check it out to a testing instance, e.g. staging.openacs.org and fill the db of that instance with a copy of the production db. Then go through each area of the site manually and copy over necessary changes from the current openacs.org-dev code. The site isn't that big, and this way we are really only copying the stuff over we want and no old bugs.

Jeff - if you agree could you create the branch in CVS please?

Hm, that basically sounds like a good plan to me Tilmann. Only change I'd make is do not branch off openacs.org from the tip of the 4.6 branch, branch it from the tagged 4.6.3 release.