Forum OpenACS Development: OpenACS 5.8.0 + PostgreSQL 9.3

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1: OpenACS 5.8.0 + PostgreSQL 9.3
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 09/18/13 10:12 AM
PostgreSQL 9.3 was announced a few days ago [1], so i made on the weekend on my mac a "port install postgresql93 postgresql93-server" and installed a fresh OpenACS 5.8.0 on this, and dumped/resorted my test instance, and everything seems fine

all the best
-gustaf neumann

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1481/

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2: Re: OpenACS 5.8.0 + PostgreSQL 9.3 (response to 1)
Posted by Jim Lynch on 09/18/13 02:05 PM
that does sound great.... I wonder if you could run the automated tests on oacs-5.8 plus pg-8.4, 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3; I'm pretty sure you'll get some failures in some of the tests... mostly when I've seen this under 5.7 or earlier, it's been fine even if there are some failures... what I'm mainly curious about, is what are some of the differences between the test results? and especially, do you get less and less failures as the pg version increases?

Thanks

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3: Re: OpenACS 5.8.0 + PostgreSQL 9.3 (response to 1)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 09/18/13 04:06 PM
Not sure what you mean by "you". if you are interested on the results, run it on the platform/in the configuration you are interested in. Before releasing OpenACS 5.8.0 we certainly run the regression tests on various configurations (linux ubuntu, rhel, mac). i would not have written "... runs on pg 9.3..." if it would not pass the regression test on openacs-core. The regression test on core shows a few errors (e.g. spell check) the same way as in OpenACS 5.6.0 or OpenACS 5.7.0.

I am not sure, why you would expect that the number of failures decreases as the pg version increases. In general, the bugs in OpenACS are not consequences of bugs in pg. I would rather expect the numbers of failures to increase, since new version of pg have properties that were unknown at the time the openacs code was developed.

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4: Re: OpenACS 5.8.0 + PostgreSQL 9.3 (response to 1)
Posted by Jim Lynch on 09/20/13 03:59 AM
Ok, maybe you did it already.... Seeing pretty often the incredible amount of effort you put into releases, I've come to expect some occasional heroism on your part. I'm pretty sure that you and your team are responsible for keeping openacs alive. In any case, let's find out:

When you first released 5.8, what version of postgres did you have running? Was it that version of pg which you first run the core tests on?

Did you run those core tests again with 5.8 on any other postgres, and if so which, and were there any differences between those results, and if so do you find them significant? Would you be willing to summarize at least one pair of results you compared?

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5: Re: OpenACS 5.8.0 + PostgreSQL 9.3 (response to 4)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 09/20/13 08:49 PM
not sure, what you mean by "heroism" and "keeping alive", but according to our download statistics [1], OpenACS 5.8.0 is doing very well (in 3 weeks more than 7.500 downloads, this are more than the total number of downloads of OpenACS 5.4.0, 5.4.1, 5.4.2, 5.4.3, 5.5.0, 5.5.1). OpenAcs is doing quite well. Since we use OpenACS in large production environments, we have certainly interest on a good code quality.

Concerning bugs etc.: The most important contribution of OpenACS 5.8.0 are that it runs on pg 9.2+ without any necessary configuration changes, and it runs efficiently also on large sites (using e.g. recursive queries for permissions). Before that, large sites had to use pg 8.3, which is already at EOL. Without the change, OpenACS would have been doomed on the longer range.

Concerning pg-versions: we run the regression tests (automated testing on acs-core) on the following pg releases: 8.4.16, 9.0.10, 9.1.5, 9.2.3, 9.2.4, all with the same results (8 errors in spell-check, complains about non-configured spellcheck, an entry about this is active in the bug tracker) and two complaints from acs-authentication (auth_password_recover, auth_password_retrieve; tries to send mail, which is on the test machines not configured). As i wrote earlier, these are exactly the same errors we were seeing with OpenACS 5.6.0 and 5.7.0 ... and now with pg 9.3.0.

The regression test does certainly not cover all of OpenACS. Here are two more figures concerning bug fixing that one might find interesting:

- this year, so far 78 bugs from the bug-tracker were fixed/resolved/closed, this is more than the sum from the previous 4 years (between 5 and 20 per year)

- OpenACS.org runs the freshest code from the oacs-5-8 branch and uses not only acs-core, but as well several packages, in which we fixed many bugs not contained in the bugtracker. These changes led to much lower numbers of error entries in the error.log: 100 days ago (using aolserver + OpenACS 5.5 + pg 8.3.5) we saw abut 17.000 errors per day, last week, we were at 3000, yesterday at 428 (many of the remaining errors are from from invalid urls, etc.). Several bugs were site-related and a single bug could cause many errors/day, but we are feeding all changes back to the oacs-5-8 branch. Eventually this branch will comes out as a OpenACS 5.8.1 release (don't ask me when).

hope, this helps
-gn

[1] https://openacs.org/projects/openacs/download/

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6: Re: OpenACS 5.8.0 + PostgreSQL 9.3 (response to 5)
Posted by Jim Lynch on 09/24/13 02:34 PM
That all sounds great... in the last few days, I went from being convinced openacs was dying or dead... now, I see it's very much alive; thanks for that.

And yes, you've completely answered my question about whether pg version is influencial over test results; according to your message, it's not influencial as the results are the same for 8.4 and all the 9.x pgs running when you've run the regression tests. Thanks for that too.

-Jim

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7: Re: OpenACS 5.8.0 + PostgreSQL 9.3 (response to 1)
Posted by hernan quispe on 10/14/13 05:56 AM
goodnight OpenACS community, I am encouraged to see a new version of OpenACS.
the point is this, I intend to customize dotLRN for a virtual classroom at the University of El Alto, Bolivia, I find a lot of material, I have problems with the installation of OpenACS 5.8.0. I hope you can help me with some documentation Thanks
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8: Re: OpenACS 5.8.0 + PostgreSQL 9.3 (response to 7)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 10/14/13 07:45 PM
Dear Hernan,

Currently, just the 41 packages on the oacs-5-8 branch [1] and the packages in used on openacs.org (e.g. edit-this-page, workflow, bugtracker, photo-album) are adapted for PostgreSQL 9.3, for other packages this work is not done. Some packages of DotLRN might work out of the box, some will require work.

In case you want to install a fresh OpenACS 5.8.0 + Postgres 9.3 installation from scratch, check out the scripts [2] and replace in the configuration part of install-oacs.sh the "HEAD" branch with "oacs-5-8" to obtain the latest from the oacs-5.8.

In case you want to upgrade postgres of an existing installation to 9.3, see [3], but be aware, that not all packages might work; we are using on production system a modified version of dotlrn mostly with xo*-based packages with PostgreSQL 9.2, so we might be able to help you through the necessary modifications, when you tell us what exact problems you are experiencing.

all the best
-gustaf neumann

[1] https://openacs.org/repository/5-8/
[2] https://openacs.org/xowiki/naviserver-openacs
[3] https://openacs.org/xowiki/upgrade-oacs-5-8

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9: Re: OpenACS 5.8.0 + PostgreSQL 9.3 (response to 8)
Posted by Prem Thomas on 10/20/13 05:54 AM
I just finished an install of OpenACS 5.8.0 with Postgres 9.3 on NaviServer 4.99.5 using the scripts referenced in footnote 2 above on Ubuntu 13.10. As suggested, oacs-5-8 was substituted for the version and packages in the script. This was among the smoothest and fastest installs of OpenACS I've done. After the base install, package installation of xowiki, search, and forums went without a bump. The only misbehavior came from the Developer Support package where ADP reveal and DB statistics seem broken. Pleasantly, Naviserver seems quite nimble.

As Jim referenced above, many thanks to Gustaf and the faithful few who have kept this project alive.

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10: Re: OpenACS 5.8.0 + PostgreSQL 9.3 (response to 9)
Posted by Prem Thomas on 10/20/13 09:31 PM
When the install is done with HEAD for version/packages, the Dev Support problems disappear. The install scripts are a boon to developers, especially when used with snapshots in virtual machines to try out various install options.