Having been here at the
beginning, when OpenACS was still ACS/pg, I believe a history page,
particularly showing the three original core people (Ben, Don, and
Roberto) that got things through at least 2.3 days (I was only involved
peripherally with the project, with the driver and PostgreSQL itself) would be wonderful.
Going through the archives I have of the old acs-pg-dev mailing list is
quite nostalgic, with the big transitions (at the time) of going from
AOLserver 2.3 to AOLserver 3.0, with everybody having problems with the
3 betas (3b5 was the most stable at the time, IIRC); going from
PostgreSQL 6.5.3 to PostgreSQL 6.6 (which became 7.0); and the biggie
of going from ACS 2.x code to 3.x code. 'That time' being late
1999 and early 2000. Getting ns_column and ns_table back in the
driver is my 'claim to fame' at the time. Sure made Ben, Don, and
Roberto's day when I did it. 'It' being a graft of code that Mark
Dalrymple did for the Oracle driver into the PostgreSQL driver, with
some rewriting for PostgreSQL-specific issues.
And I still
need to clean up that old graft job.... 😊 And I need to get the driver
using LISTEN/NOTIFY so that a connection being dropped while the
backend is churning at a lengthy query doesn't happen any more (I'll
post more details to the AOLSERVER mailing list when I know enough
about what I want to do to get comments).
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and lots of
people have made much larger contributions. But I'm glad I was
able to help, even if just a little. Dan Wickstrom helped out
early on as well, IIRC. And then he did the bind variable support
that made 4.x possible. The README file from the driver
distribution has everybody (I think) mentioned.
Other names I haven't heard in a while showed up, such as Jamie Ross and Brent Fulgham.
Man, I've been running PostgreSQL for too long... 😊 (AOLserver 2.2.1
with PostgreSQL 6.1.1 on Red Hat 4.1 was the first prototype (in 1997)
-- things didn't really work well until Red Hat 5.0's glibc and
PostgreSQL 6.2.1 teamed up with a glibc version of AOLserver 2.2.1 and
Mark Dalrymple's beta postgres driver (Hi Mark...) -- which would have
been the fall of 1997)
So, obviously, I'm all for a history page. With permission of
those mentioned in this post, I'd be glad to contribute e-mail archives
to such a page.
