[Building Sakai] MercuryPortal and CharonPortal

[Steve Swinsburg]

Hi all,

I've been doing some work on the portal and am interested in the MercuryPortal and CharonPortal, and whether or not they can be removed.

First the MercuryPortal. It has a note in the source that it is the developers portal. But as a developer, I've never used it before. Also, on sakai-dev there was a proposal back in May to remove it as it is disabled by default and may present risks, since it is unmaintained.

Next up is the CharonPortal. For all intents and purposes this looks unused, being superseded by the SkinnableCharonPortal which is the one that is configured in the portal web.xml and is actually used. Grepping through the source shows no references to CharonPortal and it even outputs its' markup via out.println(s); statements so I am guessing this is definitely unused.

To test my theories I removed the mercury-portal from the base pom and deleted mercury.war from Tomcat and CharonPortal.java from portal-impl. Built and started up. All is well.

What are your thoughts? 

Note: I originally posted this to the maintenance team but we've moved it to sakai-dev for wider discussion. I have since learnt that the OSP portal depends on the CharonPortal so another possible way forward is to move CharonPortal to the OSP project (Thanks David H). However, the OSP portal also depends on SkinnableCharonPortal so that may have implications for making OSP an indie release, or at least something to be mindful of (separate issue).

cheers,
Steve

p.s. there are also mercury related images in reference which can go along with the portal if it is removed.