[Koha-devel] RM monthly newsletter #2

[Paul Poulain]

December Release Manager newsletter (#2)

== Patches and contributors ==
This month, i've pushed almost ... 100 patches ! congrats to all the
commiters. A special thanks to ppl recently joigning us and entering the
"hall of fame" of Koha contributors: Adrien Saurat, Jon Aker, Fabio
Tiana, Duncan Tyler and Marc Balmer !


== Highlighted patches pushed ==
* in about page (Koha > More > About) there is a new tab with the
timeline of Koha. All contributors are placed here.
(comment: as it's incomplete, maybe we could/should remove the "Koha dev
team" list in the Koha team tab. We should also update "Koha Release
Team" and "Special thanks to the following organizations")
* some security issues have been fixed. Many thanks to Frère Sébastien
Marie (a French monk!) that reports them & sometimes fixes them as well !

== Jenkins ==
Jenkins (http://jenkins.koha-community.org/) is now "stable". Some new
tests have been added to the test suite last week. Thanks to those who
have fixed tests that are failing.
There are 3 possible reasons for a test to fail:
* the code of Koha is wrong. This was not the largest part of the failures.
* the code of the test is wrong. This can come from a test not updated
after a commit that should have (API changed), or a test case that had
been forgotten
* the test database is wrong. There are 2 kinds of tests: general tests
(ie: are templates valid, are perl scripts perlcritic compliant) and DB
dependant tests (ie: is patron searching working). If you want to play
with the sample database we use on jenkins, just start a fresh install
of Koha and check all the optional options in the webinstaller to
install sample itemtypes, patron categories, ...

To finish with jenkins, i'd like to see more tests being submitted !
Sometimes I'm also a little bit disappointed to see that some tests are
OK, just because we don't test everything. For example, perlcritic test
don't try to check some directories.
Here is the list of all dirs that should be checked:
> my @all_koha_dirs = qw( acqui admin authorities basket C4 catalogue cataloguing circ debian errors
> labels members misc offline_circ opac patroncards reports reserve reviews rotating_collections
> serials sms suggestion t tags test tools virtualshelves);

and here is the list of all checked dirs:
> my @dirs = qw( acqui admin authorities basket catalogue cataloguing circ debian errors labels
>     offline_circ reserve reviews rotating_collections serials sms virtualshelves );

Feel free to work on directories that are still untested !
just run perlcritic xxxx/ to see what is failing for directory xxxx

== Koha speed ==
Last month, and it will continue next months, i've been focusing on Koha
speed. A lot of improvements can be done on this matter.

The main one will be moving from CGI to a persistent layer like mod_perl
or plack. I've been told that Catalyst & Bywater are working on that,
I'm impatiently waiting for some feedback & will participate personally
if I can.
But persistence is not the only thing we can work on. Some patches have
been pushed or are waiting to improve the speed of Koha.

* bug 6193: reading xml config file from memcache = if you've memcache
activated, then the Koha config file will be read from memcached, not
from XML parsing, that is a consuming a lot of time (250ms on my laptop !)
* bug 6015: benchmarking suite: I've completed (& pushed) a script to
benchmark Koha. It's located in misc/load_testing/benchmark_staff.pl

4 patches bugs related to speed/performance are waiting for you:
* bug 6000: Performance enhancements for C4::Context and C4::Languages
(needs signoff)
* bug 6019: Using memoize_memcached to cache slow subroutines (needs
signoff)
* Bug 6875 - de-nesting C4 packages (needs signoff) -note that each
patch is independant and could/should be splitted in a separate bug,
6875 becoming an omnibus
* Bug 7170 - Remove use of XML::Simple (needs a patch !)

I also have added a page on the wiki
(http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Benchmark_for_3.8) with some
benchmarking results. I'll continue filling this page everytime I push a
patch that has something to do with speed.

== Database update ==
The database update (bug
http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=7167) is ready,
signed off, and only waiting for some QA from the QA team. As writers of
this patch are also members of the QA team (Jonathan & me), I hope the
QA will be OK ;-)

== Testing sandboxes ==
When I applied as RM, I announced that I planned to create sandbox to
help ppl testing Koha. The idea is to have some sandboxes, and any
volunteer could connect to this sandbox, say "I want to test bug XXXX",
and, a few minutes later, be could connect to
sandbox10.koha-community.org, and test the patches under XXXX

Those sandboxes will use git bz (a very handy tool you should use !),
see http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Git_bz_configuration, let you
choose a test database. The results of the git bz commands will be made
available on the home page of the staff interface, to check everything
went well.
Also note that this will work well only once the new updatedatabase will
have been pushed. Without the new DB update system, it won't be possible
to tests patches with a DB update in those sandboxes.

I couldn't work on those sandboxes this month, but I really plan to work
on it next month !

== Patches waiting ==
A lot of work has been made on bugzilla, and there are "only" 64 patches
waiting for signoff and 55 patches waiting for QA.
Keep on the good work !

== Hackfest in Europe ==
In case you missed the news BibLibre (my company, in case you don't
know) organize a hackfest in Marseille in March. More information at
http://drupal.biblibre.com/en/blog/entry/2012-hackfest-in-europe, feel
free to join, all attendees will get a special thanks on this newsletter
after the hackfest ;-)

I wish each of you the best for 2012 ! including, of course, a lot of
fun hacking Koha !
-- 
Paul POULAIN
http://www.biblibre.com
Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc
Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08