[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Heads up on Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" and current Evergreen incompatibility

[Dan Scott]

So, as an early adopter, I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" on Friday.

Right now, you don't want to try running the current Evergreen code on
Ubuntu 8.04.

1. The staff client won't work; it seems that in the move from
xulrunner 1.8.1.4 in Gutsy -> 1.8.1.13 in Hardy, they added some extra
permission checks that the current Evergreen staff client doesn't deal
with. So you'll see exceptions at the command line like:
"""Exception... "Security Manager vetoed action"  nsresult:
"0x80570027 (NS_ERROR_XPC_SECURITY_MANAGER_VETO)"""

2. Ubuntu 8.04 ships with PostgreSQL 8.3.0. This is the first release
of PostgreSQL in which full-text search is part of the core database
engine, rather than a contributed module (called 'tsearch2'). When the
PostgreSQL developers moved full-text search into core, they made the
interface more consistent - but broke backwards compatibility in the
process. Evergreen, of course, relies heavily on PostgreSQL's
full-text search, and currently ships with schemas for the old
tsearch2 module - so Evergreen won't work with PostgreSQL 8.3. There
is a compatibility module for tsearch2 that can help a bit, but the
real answer is to build a PostgreSQL 8.3 schema for Evergreen.

** Note that the Ubuntu upgrade process is smart enough to recognize
that upgrading from PostgreSQL 8.2 -> 8.3 will break applications, so
it will keep PostgreSQL 8.2 around until you tell it to move to 8.3.
This means that if you upgrade your Ubuntu server to 8.04, you can
keep running Evergreen on it. You just won't be running a supported
version of PostgreSQL...

I hope to be able to hunt down the staff client problem in the next
day or two. I've also started looking into what it will take to build
the PostgreSQL 8.3.0 schema, but that will take more time. Until these
incompatibilities are fixed, I would strongly advise you to stick with
Debian 4.0 "Etch" for your server and Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" for
your client... or pitch in and help fix them :)

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University