[Deploying Sakai] [Building Sakai] [WG: Sakai QA] sakai-2.6.3: test/recommend deployers useTomcat 5.5.28+?

[Berg, Alan]

Hi all,

in the short term QA has too little resources even to tie its own shoelaces :) However, we do want to move the lifecycle along. Tomcat 6 is reputed to give a performance boost over Tomcat 5 and no doubt there are a raft of other reasons for the change. It concerns me that the suggestion has been around prior to 2.6, therefore to keep the momentum in the lifecycle we should make sure we do this by 2.8. I agree with Chucks point that we should have a nightly running  keeping the structures similar to Tomcat 5. I would then need a QA volunteer(s) to measure what gets broken and push back into Jira promptly,

Alan B.

Alan Berg
QA Director - The Sakai Foundation

Senior Developer / Quality Assurance
Group Education and Research Services
Central Computer Services
University of Amsterdam

http://home.uva.nl/a.m.berg




-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Whyte [mailto:arwhyte at umich.edu]
Sent: Tue 29-6-2010 16:09
To: csev; Boston Ian
Cc: Developers Sakai-Dev; production at collab.sakaiproject.org; Berg, Alan; Sakai QA
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] [WG: Sakai QA] [Deploying Sakai] sakai-2.6.3: test/recommend deployers useTomcat 5.5.28+?
 
At the Denver 2x project planning meeting we've targeted Tomcat 6 as a servlet container option for Sakai 2.8.0.

http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/MGT/Sakai+2x+Project+Planning+Goals

Regarding, Ian's earlier question:  "Although these issues also exist in TC6, is there a reason why you are not testing on 6 ?  The kernel was patched about 2 years ago to run in TC6."

A number of us raised the issue of moving to Tomcat 6 for Sakai 2.7 before and during the Boston Conference (2009) but looking back over the project planning notes the idea appears to have been scrapped over concerns of insufficient QA resources.

http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/MGT/Proposed+Sakai+2.7+Changes?focusedCommentId=66651134#comment-66651134

SAK-10720 details work performed on Tomcat 6 during 2008 but ends with the comment: "Sakai 2.6 will not be using Tomcat 6."  I suspect that concerns over QA resources played a role in this decision too.  

http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-10720

I'll leave it to Alan to provide a definitive opinion but I suspect that expanding 2.6.x->2.6.3 QA to include testing deployments to both Tomcat 5.5 and Tomcat 6 is beyond our current capabilities.  Moreover, tossing Tomcat 6 in to 2.6.x testing at this point in time would undoubtedly delay the release of sakai-2.6.3, a maintenance release that is long overdue.

Cheers,

Anth





On Jun 29, 2010, at 9:13 AM, csev wrote:

> 
> On Jun 29, 2010, at 5:20 AM, Steve Swinsburg wrote:
> 
>> There is also the option of adjusting the Tomcat classloader configuration in conf/catalina.properties to restore the old common/lib, shared/lib behaviour:
>> shared.loader=${catalina.base}/shared/classes,${catalina.base}/shared/lib/*.jar
>> 
>> However, we would also need to be QA'ing against Tomcat 5.5 as well since some people might want to upgrade between 2.7 versions but not switch app servers.
>> 
>> I would -1 moving to Tomcat 6 in a point release of 2.7 and rather it go to 2.8 since it is quite a disruptive change.
> 
> I would agree that we move to Tomcat 6 only in 2.8 (i.e. not in 2.7.n) - and in particular in 2.8 we stick with the old directory layout in Sakai 2.8 / Tomcat 6 using the parameter above (i.e. we do not change the deployment folder structure in 2.8) - if we later decide to go with a 2.8 deployment folder structure - we only do so *after* there is wide production experience with Sakai and T6 (i.e.change deployment patterns in 2.9 at the earliest).
> 
> I would also immediately switch the nightly servers of trunk/2.8/experimental to T6 with the above setting *right away* to give as much informal testing as we can muster in the run-up to 2.8
> 
> This gives us a way to do solid testing of T6 - with the ability to drop back to T5 if something comes up in 2.8 even rather late in the game.
> 
> /Chuck
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