[Koha-devel] RM monthly newsletter

[Paul Poulain]

Hello,

I'll try to release every month a newsletter that will summarize what
has been done during the previous month.
i've started my job one month ago, so, here is my 1st newsletter

== Starting my job ==
We had a few trouble to setup the permissions on git repository. Thanks
to chris & brendan work, I could start pushing during the KohaCon11.
I have written on the wiki how I push patches on git.koha-community.org
(http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/How_the_RM_push)
There are a few patches i've pushed directly (and only) on master
branch. That's only documentation of typo fixes.

== Roadmap ==
I've written a roadmap on the wiki (see
http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Roadmap_to_3.8)
There are 2 differents parts on this roadmap: technical improvements and
functionnal improvements.
Some of those improvements already have a bugzilla entry, and some of
them even have a patch.
For technical improvements, i've made an omnibus entry:
http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=7119
For functionnal improvements promized by BibLibre, there is an omnibus
entry as well: http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=7163

I highlight 2 points on the roadmap that have seen some progress this month:
=== Updatedatabase news ===
There has been a lot of discussions about database update, and how to
de-linearize the DB update process. The bug is the number 7167, and some
code will be submitted very soon
=== YUI/Jquery stuff ===
We plan to remove YUI in favor of jquery. Owen has started a lot of work
on this, you can look at bug 5481, that provide a link to his gitorious
repository.
We also have to replace the old calendar picker by a more recent one,
owen's work does that as well
Last comment on jquery: Julian has submitted some code in bug 6836.
Jared & Owen are working on this patch, and I hope it will be signed-off
& pushed quickly. One it's OK, the hardest part will have to be made=
work on each page with a table to replace tablesorter by datatables !

== Important patch pushed ==
This paragraph highlight some patches that are not related to features,
but to the code itself
=== mySQL error trapping ===
(Bug 7184) If you set DEBUG=1 in your Apache virtual host, any MySQL
error will result in a die with the exact error. This will prevent Koha
being silent in case of a wrong SQL query and help a lot fixing any problem
=== docbook documentation ===
(Bug 4877) Many documentation has been added to manage koha-* tools.
Thanks to Magnus
== Perl::Critic compliance ==
(Bug 6697) Many scripts have been updated to be Perl::Critic compliant.
Thanks to chris for the effort, hoping other will join. It's quite
"easy" to identify what must be done: just run "perlcritic
scriptname.pl" to test if scriptname.pl is compliant or no. If it is
not, you'll have errors detailled.
For example:
perlcritic tools/export.pl says:
tools/export.pl: I/O layer ":utf8" used at line 59, column 5.  Use
":encoding(UTF-8)" to get strict validation.  (Severity: 5)

== Hilighted patches needing signoff ==
All patches are worth being signed-off, but i'd like to hilight some of
them:
 - Bug 6836, to replace tablesorter by datatable
 - Bug 7127, to have templates be valid XHTML
 - Bug 7240, to clean up the database from out-of-date datas (old
imported_records for example)
 - Bug 6990, to improve performances of MARC to Koha decoding. This sub
is called in many places, so the improvement will be a big boost !
 - Bug 6875, to improve performances, by de-nesting nested C4::Packages.
Some of the proposed bugs have already been pushed, but many are still
to be signed-off. If everything was signed-off, that would mean -24% in
the number of perl statements executed on mainpage.pl and -16% for
opac-details !
 - Bug 6716, to improve the database documentation. This will be usefull
for schema.koha-community.org and all users wanting to build SQL queries

== Bugzilla ==
When I push a patch, I usually check the following things:
 - is the patch "assigned" ? Sometimes, it's still "NEW". In this case,
I set the patch to "ASSIGNED", and, if needed update the assignee to
reflect the author of the patch pushed
 - if the patch is an ENH, set version to rel_3_8. Otherwise, set
version to rel_3_6. It help chris_n knowing which patch must be pushed
on 3.6.x, and will also help knowing what is in rel_3_8

== Jenkins ==
At the moment, jenkins says that master is unstable. It means some test
have failed. If someone want to volunteer to investigate why and fix the
problem, he will be warmly welcomed ! It can be because a patch has been
pushed with a problem, or because the test is wrong. In this case, just
fix the test in t/ directory, and, once it's pushed by me, jenkins will
automatically run the updated test.

See you next month for the 2nd RM newsletter !

PS: is this newsletter worth being published on koha-community.org
website ? somewhere else (send me your ideas !)
-- 
Paul POULAIN
http://www.biblibre.com
Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc
Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08