The Sakai installation nightmare

Ok, a lot of water has passed down the bridge, a few weeks of work and creating Tag Clouds for Sakai using Lucene indexes.
The installation nightmare was terrible and it seems that it finally ended, for a while.... the problem I think is the incredible pressure that frameworks impose on developers. As there are so many things to care of, obviously, as human beings that we are, we just forgot.
Two important bugs were taking care of our problems:

• When upgrading to Hibernate 3, the people from Sakai forgot to change the declaration of some DTDs, the bug is here. The found the problem and created a patch, I tried the production branch and it didn't work... it was hard to realize that when they committed the patch, they forgot one file... ok, I posted the problem and now it's fixed.
• But when we were trying to install from the 2.3.x branch again, the errors came up again, but why? Well, Dimitri found that a set on the build.properties file we were using was the problem, we set maven.build.dir to a different place than target, just to hide it in Eclipse, it was changed to ".target". The problem was that a tool named samigo had a "hard coded" path using the target build.dir, why this happens? because there are too many pieces to move and people just forget. Well, Dimitri reported the bug, another little improvement. Now we have to make Sakai work properly with our code.
  

Installing Sakai

Ok, the facts:

1. Sakai is VERY HARD to install, too many versions, poor documentation, and nobody doing something to ease the process.
2. Sakai has a lot of engineering time spent on its architecture so it has features and is able to scale like no other open source LMS.
3. Apache's Lucene is a great solution for what i want to do, it parses documents and even create the TFIDF vectors, so i want it.
4. We have to convince some teachers about letting us use the data from essays that their students has uploaded to the course site. So we need an LMS.
5. Lucene is already integrated with Sakai, i.e. I have to use it....

I promise that if a have the time during my research to do something for all the people that has to live the nightmare of installing Sakai and making it work.... I'll do it.

Starting my Ph.D.

Ok, I'm starting this posts as a way of keep a log of the thoughts and things that are already happening to me during my attempt to get a Ph.D. from the Uni of Sydney.
I already have my first two tasks:

1. Use the copy machine to get 10 copies of a chapter about "How to write a decent thesis" and another 10 copies of a form called "What do you think your advisor is useful for"
2. Build a prototype of a Text Mining Service to integrate with an LMS by July, so we can test it on the second semester and then try to convince some teachers to use it and get a whole bunch of data to work with.

To be honest, by the time I'm writing this, I already finished the first task. It wasn't so hard, but believe me, the copy machine can be sometimes a little more complicated than an Artificial Intelligence algorithm.