Moodle development traffic 6/2011
Current stable version 2.0.1+
Total of 27 submitted patches for Moodle 2.0 were accepted this week. Eight pull requests were rejected. To highlight some of the accepted patches, Andrew Davis fixed a blocker issue reported by Aaron Cowell causing errors in RSS feeds generated by Moodle (MDL-24870). ♦ Dongsheng Cai fixed a bug in Database activity module’s templates editor (MDL-25671). ♦ Eloy Lafuente prepared an emergency fix of a regression blocking the upgrade at Oracle servers.
Previous stable version 1.9.10+
There is a single accepted patch for Moodle 1.9 from the last week. Eloy Lafuente fixed a regression in Database activity module reported by Paul Nijbakker. Some module functions redirected user to the first record in the database instead of to the correct one (MDL-26052). The second submitted patch for Moodle 1.9 improving inefficient computation of tag correlations had to be rejected because the included SQL statement was not cross-platform and worked under MySQL only (MDL-24355).
Quotes of the week
“I think we need to become serious and start rejecting any commit with [trailing] whitespace.”
– Eloy Lafuente strongly recommends all developers and contributors to set up their IDE properly
“Open source sometimes actually works, even without doing the programming yourself.”
– Sam Marshall knows that reporting a bug is sometimes enough to make the thing fixed
Testing Moodle on various databases
Moodle 2.0 officially supports four major database systems: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL and Oracle. I have PostgreSQL and MySQL installed on my Linux workstation and I use PostgreSQL 8.3 at the moment as the major platform for the development – simply because I believe that if a code works at PostgreSQL, it is generally more cross-platform than a code that was tested on MySQL. Though there are exceptions, of course.
To help with testing patches related to MSSQL, I decided to set up MSSQL server for me. I have successfully installed and set up MSSQL Server 2008 R2 Express edition. The server runs in a virtual machine on my notebook. I use VirtualBox from Oracle (Yes, Oracle made VirtualBox and we’ve always been at war with Eastasia) networked via a bridge between the Linux host and Windows guest. That allows me to have Moodle installed in my Gentoo being connected to the MSSQL database in Windows via freetds driver. To test the new sqlsrv driver, I downloaded Moodle Windows package to the guest and was able to install it there, too.
