OpenACS 4.6.3 Release Notes

by Don Baccus
OpenACS docs are written by the named authors, and may be edited by OpenACS documentation staff.

This is a final release of OpenACS 4.6.3. This release has been subjected to an organized test effort, but please bear in mind that we are still in the process of developing testing tools, methodology, and scripts.

Please report bugs using our Bug Tracker at the OpenACS website . This version of the OpenACS Toolkit supports PostgreSQL 7.2.3 and 7.3.2, and Oracle 8i. It will not work with Oracle 9i (support is planned for OpenACS 4.7.)

Upgrading from OpenACS 4.x

OpenACS 4.6.3 includes key datamodel changes to acs-kernel and other packages. Your first step after downloading OpenACS 4.6.3 and restarting AOLserver should be to visit the Package Manager, click on the "install packages" link, and select the checkbox to upgrade acs-kernel. After acs-kernel has been upgraded, return to the "install packages" page and select the checkboxes for all other packages you have installed that need upgrading (they are marked "upgrade" rather than "new install") and perform the upgrade step.

After packages have been upgraded, your installation should run without problems.

Upgrade Instructions

You may want to begin by reading our installation documentation for Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X.

After installation, the full documentation set can be found by visiting http://[your-host]/doc. Installation and maintenance documents are current for 4.6.3 but other documentation may lag behind.

Site Wide Searching

If you're using Oracle 8.1.6 or 8.1.7 Enterprise Edition you may want to uncomment the SQL that causes InterMedia to keep online searching online while indexing. The feature doesn't exist in Standard Edition and OpenACS 4.6.3 now defaults to being loadable in SE. Just grep for 'sync' to find the code.

Also be sure to read the documentation in the Site Wide Search package's sql/oracle directory. The APM doesn't execute the SQL for this package, in part due to the fact that some steps need to be run as the Oracle user 'ctxsys'.

If you're using PostgreSQL be sure to read the documentation on installing the Open FTS driver for OpenACS. It's included in the package as a text file and is also summarized at the end of the installation documentation in the section, 4 . As with the Oracle version, there are steps you must take manually in order to get this feature working.

Testing Notes

dotLRN 1.0 is an e-learning solution from MIT based on OpenACS 4.6.3 The dotLRN 1.0 testing effort was organized by Bart Teeuwisse and made use of the OpenACS Bug Tracker and OpenACS test servers hosted by Collaboraid .

($Id: release-notes-4-6-3.html,v 1.14 2004/02/24 17:42:25 joela Exp $)
View comments on this page at openacs.org