[Koha-devel] Final stretch before the next release (3.24 | 16.05)

[Jonathan Druart]

Hi devs,

The next Koha release will arrive soon and the feature freeze is
coming in 2 weeks!
I'd like to mention some works we really should have in this release:

1/ Speed improvements
* Koha::Cache
Interesting ideas have been implemented recently, but only few have been pushed.
We can expect a real gain of performances, our cache system
(Koha::Cache) has been improved with bug 11998 and 16044 but is not
perfect yet. To make it great, we absolutely need patches from 16221
(Use Storable::dclone() instead of Clone::clone() for L1 cache
deep-copying mode), and then 16140 (Only clear L1 cache when needed)
and 16166 (Improve L1 cache performance).
Bug 16105 (Cache::Memory is loaded even if memcache is used) is also
cache-related.

* Search
There are 3 bug reports blocking bug 15262 (Run Koha Run. Koha search
should be fast again) : bug 15263 (XSLT display fetches sysprefs for
every result processed) is waiting for QA but 16041 is waiting for
signoff. Note that I have opened 16167 to discuss about the possible
removal of authorised value images. If you know someone using them,
please add a comment on the bug report.

To have an overview of what has been done around the performance
optimisation during the last months or still need to be done, have a
look at the bug 15342 (Performance 3.22 - Omnibus).

2/ Elastic Search
A testing day is organised soon (today and tomorrow), stay tuned!

3/ Rewrite/refactoring
I have worked a lot on refactoring some parts of Koha the last months.
There are 5 left waiting for love:
Bug 15801 - Move the framework related code to Koha::BiblioFramework[s] - part 2
Bug 15758 - Move the C4::Branch related code to Koha::Libraries - part 4
Bug 15407 - Move the patron categories related code to
Koha::Patron::Categories - part 2
Bug 15498 - Replace ExportWithCsvProfile with ExportCircHistory
Bug 15451 - Move the CSV related code to Koha::CsvProfile[s]

I really would like to see them included into the next release.
For the first 3, it's the continuation of parts already pushed, it
would make sense to have them too.

4/ jQuery upgrade
Owen suggested to upgrade our jQuery on bug 15883, it is a nice to
have for the next release.

5/ Bug fixes
* CGI->multi_param
You have certainly notice the "CGI::param called in list context"
warnings in the logs. We are going to get rid of them with bug 16154 -
Replace CGI->param with CGI->multi_param in list context
* Regression on currency
This will become a blocker if not signed off soon. See bug 16227 - The
currencies of vendor and order do not display correctly
* The OPAC is not accessible if JS is disabled (blocker)!
See bug 16210 (Bug 15111 breaks the OPAC if JavaScript is disabled) for a fix

6/ Versioning change
It seems that we voted [1] for changing the versioning to be date
based. Does someone work on that? There are adjustments to do to the
codebase to make it work. But we also need to decide how to number the
2 annual major versions and the minors.

Feel free to add more if you think about something.

Note: please sort by severity when you are searching for a bug to sign
off [2], blocker, critical and major have to be signoff before
cosmetic bugs ;)

Cheers,
Jonathan

PS: Note that there are 5 points before the 6th!

[1] http://meetings.koha-community.org/2016/genereal_irc_meeting_9_march_2016.2016-03-09-20.00.log.html)
[2] https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/buglist.cgi?bug_status=Needs%20Signoff&columnlist=product%2Ccomponent%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_status%2Cshort_desc%2Cchangeddate%2Cbug_severity&list_id=160792&order=bug_severity%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_id%20DESC&query_based_on=Needs%20Signoff&query_format=advanced