Forum OpenACS Development: 4.6.3 and beyond

I need to get started on some intranet work and have some questions. Is there a date for release of 4.6.3? What is the status of CVS head? Has the merge of the 4.6 branch and head been completed?

Is there a CVS repository of the dotWRK or dotPROJECT stuff? What in the dotLRN framework is going to be pushed into OpenACS and are there any tenative timelines? When is newportal going into OpenACS?

Are dotLRN and dotWRK going to be specific configurations of the same code base. Is dotXXX planed to become just a configuration of OpenACS once the poral infrastructure is there?

Sorry for all of the questions, we need to do some planning here are trying to figure out what the high level plan is where we can help. Thanks.

First my apologies for not doing a good job of communicating on OpenACS 4.6.3.  I had a family crisis to deal with over the last two weeks and that threw a monkey wrench into my ability to work with folks to plan the release.

I've been talking to hackers who have been working on last-minute issues they wanted to get fixed, and the tentative  schedule right now is to tag 4.6.3 on Sunday and cut a first beta tarball, with all code frozen except bug fixes necessary to make the release work.  I'll be begging for people to download and test it next week, thus far some of the usual suspects (myself, Joel, Peter) are planning to spend time doing so but it would be nice to have more.

This release is a bug fix release, though one "bug" is a big fix (making rss support work for Oracle.)  Since the scope of changes is far, far less than for 4.6->4.6.2 we won't be organizing testing on the scale we did, say, for 4.6 (5.0's a different story, we'll need a LOT of testing before letting that one out the door.)

In parallel (or nearly so, depending on my schedule) I'll cut a .LRN 1.0.1 tarball, which consists of a very small number of changes to the .LRN packages themselves.  Since we decided to bundle a simple-to-install single .LRN tarball whenever we bump OpenACS we'll bump .LRN so folks using that application benefit without having to track down packages on their own.

I'll update the project pages over the weekend.

CVS HEAD has not been merged with 4.6 and this work should begin just as soon as 4.6.3 is wrapped and ready to go.

There was a very serious blunder in 4.6.2 (form validation was largely broken) and this has forced us to make 4.6.3 our top short-term priority ...

OpenMSG coordinated testing for 4.6 and 4.6.1.  Collaboraid coordinated testing for 4.6.2 and .LRN 1.0.  Neither are available at the moment.

We can loosely coordinate testing next week by divvying up packages amongst the half-dozen or so who've volunteered, but if it lies upon my shoulders to coordinate that it will be very loose indeed.  If someone wants to offer to manage testing a bit more closely that would be fantastic.

I don't look at testing 4.6.3 as being an effort to dig out bugs that have been lingering in the code undiscovered forever, I'm more interested to make certain that we've not broken things that currently work in 4.6.2 while fixing several issues that cropped up after 4.6.2 was released.

With 5.0 we want to become more rigorous.  What would *really* be wonderful with 5.0 would be to have a small but dedicated group of folks willing to work on some regression tests using the automated testing package and tclwebtest.  Joel's going to  try to write tests for one package as a test of the amount of effort and to help him understand how to write step-by-step documentation.  Regression testing would've caught the major "oops" that slipped through 4.6.2 testing, the breakage of form validation.