By Anthony Whyte on Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:04:23 GMT

Last night I cut the second alpha tag for the upcoming Sakai 2.6.0 release.  Per Megan May's direction I took the head of the 2-6-x branch for the tag.  QA admins are now adding the tag to their respective servers.  The tag is available for checkout at

https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/sakai/tags/sakai-2.6.0-alpha02/

A list of fixes that have been applied to the 2-6-x maintenance branch since the creation of the sakai-2.6.0-alpha01 tag is also available for review.

By Anthony Whyte on Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:21:08 GMT

I've set up an instance of Sakai 2.5.x (Apache/Tomcat/MySQL) to support the UX project work undertaken by Nathan Pearson, Nico Matthijs and others in the Sakai Community.  The URI for the site is http://ux.sakaiproject.org.  Nico will be updating the installation with code that can be found at https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/ux/trunk. 

By Anthony Whyte on Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:38:20 GMT

I've generated the first Sakai 2.6.0 tag for QA: sakai-2.6.0-alpha01.  It is available at

https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/sakai/tags/sakai-2.6.0-alpha01

I originally planned on creating a 2.6.0 branch (in line with what I do for maintenance releases) and then cutting the alpha01 tag from it once I had tweeked the POM values to more closely match the tag name but my colleagues prevailed on me to hold off on branch creation and cut the tag directly from 2-6-x in order to keep branch management (i.e., merges) at a minimum.  

The advantage of working from a 2.6.0 branch rather than from the *x branch is the greater control one can exert on what ultimately ends up in the release.  Recall that 2-6-x .externa ... Read More »

By Anthony Whyte on Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:48:16 GMT

I've generated the Sakai 2.5.3 release artifacts and final tag and updated the release page.  I've tested (lightly) the sakai-demo-2-5-3.tar.gz, sakai-src-2-5-3.tgz and the sakai_2-5-3 tag, the latter two with a fresh Tomcat 5.5.26, empty MySQL 5.0.51 database and an empty .M2 org/sakaiproject repo.  The demo runs and the source artifact and tag both build and start up in Tomcat.

By Anthony Whyte on Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:21:18 GMT

As I write my tag builder script is busy cranking out an RC 03 tag for the upcoming Sakai 2.5.3 maintenance release.  The tag was cut from the 2.5.3 branch which was itself earlier generated from the 2.5.x maintenance branch.  Unlike previous beta and RC tags that were created directly from the *x branch using a single SVN revision number (e.g. 2.5.x r48404 for the ill-fated 2.5.1 release), 2.5.3 represents a targeted approach that provides fixes to specific sets of tools and services.  This strategy allows QA to better harness their resources and focus their testing on limited areas of the code base.  2.5.4 and succeeding maintenance releases will reflect this pattern. 

Regarding the 2.5 maintenance series, 2.5.1 included over 120 fixes but was never released officially due to the discovery of a nasty portfolio bug during final testing of the release artifacts.  2.5.2 was the ... Read More »

By Anthony Whyte on Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:12:53 GMT

The presentation tool is a core tool that provides the capability to upload and display sets of images to users.  However, I sense that this tool is little used by the Community.   The University of Michigan, for example, stealthes the tool since there is little interest in it given its current capabilities.

For 2.6.0 I'd like to suggest that we remove the tool from the release.   This does not necessarily mean that we need to go through the process of physically moving the files from the main SVN repo to our contrib repo, although this could be done.  Rather, we could simply modify the Sakai .externals file to exclude it from /trunk and maintenance branch check outs as well as generate release artifacts without it.

Indeed, I might well be wrong about the size of the Presentation Tool's institutional user base.  If so, it would be premature to exclude it from the release.  But if it ... Read More »

By Anthony Whyte on Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:46:46 GMT

Tueseday I finished generating the 2.5.2 source, binary and demo artifacts, javadocs, taglib docs and poms/jars for the Sakai Maven2 repo, cut the final 2.5.2 tag and prepped the Sakai 2.5.2 release page. Artifact testing has so far proved positive so the release should be ready for public consumption.

Sakai 2.5.2 succeeds the ill-fated 2.5.1 release that included a nasty portfolio bug discovered only after I had generated the 2.5.1 release artifacts. A disappointing find to be sure but issues of this sort are bound to happen from time to time and it helped set a precedent of quickly responding to the issue, incrementing the version number by one and cutting a new release.

Bring on 2.5.3.

By Anthony Whyte on Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:59:21 GMT

When commiting code changes to the Sakai SVN repository I forget occasionally to include the relevant Jira "SAK" issue number in the log entry.  We use the Jira Subversion plugin and neglecting to include the Jira reference in the commit log message prevents the commit info from being picked up by Jira.

Good

svn commit -m "SAK-13784 update Tomcat version to 5.5.26"

Bad

svn commit -m "update Tomcat version to 5.5.26"

So if you are bad like I am sometimes, issue the following svn command to correct the log, including the original commit's revision number and the updated log entry:

svn propset - ... Read More »

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Anthony Whyte's Sakai blog

By Anthony Whyte on Tue, 20 May 2008 01:26:36 GMT

There's a thread on the Sakai pedagogy list called "Content Authoring" that's morphed into a discussion regarding Sakai's relative openness as an open-source project.  During the exchange there was a mention of Ohloh by Chuck Severance which drew a response from one participant in the discussion asking to see richer Ohloh profiles of Sakai core/contrib committers.

Since we started enlisting Sakai projects on Ohloh, 71 core and 87 contrib contributors have been tracked (the latter group also contribute heavily to Sakai core projects).  Only a fraction of the profiles listed include any information beyond the basic developer X as represented by a portion of their email address has made Y commits since Month Z.

Creating an account permits developers to provide additional inform ... Read More »

By Anthony Whyte on Fri, 09 May 2008 05:22:28 GMT