May 2002 - Koha-devel - lists.koha-community.org

Acceptance Letter
by Pat Eyler 31 May '02

31 May '02

31 May, 2002 To the Koha community; I'd like to take a moment to accept the role of Kaitiaki[1] of Koha, to thank those who have done so much work already, and to give an overview of where I think we need to be going as a community. Let me start with a bit of background: for the last month or so, there has been an ongoing discussion between the developers about the desirability of an official management/leadership function for the Koha project. The good folks at Katipo have been doing an admirable job in this area, and are voluntarily opening this process up to the larger community. The result of these discussions was a decision to elect a person to oversee the project. This person's role is to work with the other developers and the users of Koha to guide its development into a library system that can serve the needs of any library; large or small, english speaking or not. The Kaitiaki will help craft a strategy for growth and development, encourage organizations to use Koha, improve support for Koha, and recruit additional developers for the project. In our last meeting, 30 May 2002, the developers present decided to name me, Pat Eyler, as the Kaitiaki. I'm honored and humbled by this decision. I'd like to pledge to all of you, users and developers, that I'll do my best to make Koha as successful, as complete, as user-friendly, and as capable as it can possibly be. Koha would not exist if not for the efforts of the Horowhenua Library Trust (HLT) and Katipo. I'll mention only three people by name, not because they are the only ones to have worked on it, but because I'm afraid I'd leave people out if I tried to mention everyone. Rosalie Blake (Head of Libraries for HLT), Rachel Hamilton-Williams (General Manager at Katipo), and Chris Cormack (Programmer at Katipo) should be well recognized for their courage and efforts. I hope that we'll be working together for a long time to come. Since Koha's initial release to the world outside Katipo and HLT, many others have contributed to the project. I'd like to thank all of them for their efforts, and encourage them to keep up their good work. I'll close with a quick overview of my hopes for Koha in the coming year or so. In the near term, we'll be releasing Koha 1.2.0 featuring a number of bug fixes and improvements. We'll likely release a few more 1.2 series releases as well featuring yet more improvements and bug fixes. Sometime in the late summer or early fall, we'll begin releasing the 1.4 series. This release series will feature MARC capabilities as well as continuing improvements. In parallel to these efforts, we'll be trying to internationalize Koha. Our first targets will be Polish (updating an earlier translation) and Spanish (a brand new translation). The experience we gain from these two efforts should help us make additional translations much easier. We're also going to work hard to raise community awareness of Koha in both the Open Source/Free Software and the professional library communities. This work will involve announcements, appearances at conferences, and more work on documentation. If you'd like to participate in any of these efforts, or if you would like to suggest additional projects for us to take on, please feel free to email me at <pate(a)gnu.org>. thanks, -pate Pat Eyler Kaitiaki of the Koha Project [1] Kaitiaki, pronounced kah-ee-tee-ah-kee (unless my Maori pronunciation is badly off), means guardian.

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May 30th irc meeting
by Pat Eyler 31 May '02

31 May '02

Just a quick note to let everyone know that meeting notes from the May 30th meeting are posted at: http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=IrcMeetingNotes a full log is at: http://www.haz.cmsd.bc.ca/cgi-bin/kohalog.pl?date=30May02&refresh=&firstlin… Thanks, -pate

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proposed marc schema
by Tonnesen Steve 30 May '02

30 May '02

I ran some benchmarks on Sergey's proposed marc schema, because I was a little concerned about the performance problems of having to do a join to retrieve a biblio. To recap, here are the schemas that I used. The first table is my "all-in-one" schema, the second two are Sergey's: CREATE TABLE marc_subfield_table ( subfieldid bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment, tagid bigint(20) NOT NULL default '0', tag char(3) NOT NULL default '', bibid bigint(20) NOT NULL default '0', subfieldorder tinyint(4) NOT NULL default '0', subfieldcode char(1) NOT NULL default '', subfieldvalue varchar(255) default NULL, valuebloblink bigint(20) default NULL, PRIMARY KEY (subfieldid), KEY (bibid,tagid,tag,subfieldcode), KEY (bibid,tag,subfieldcode,subfieldvalue) ) TYPE=MyISAM; CREATE TABLE marc_field_table_sergey ( fieldid bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment, bibid bigint(20) NOT NULL default '0', tagid bigint(20) NOT NULL default '0', tag char(3) NOT NULL default '', PRIMARY KEY (fieldid), KEY (bibid), KEY (tagid), KEY (tag) ); CREATE TABLE marc_subfield_table_sergey ( subfieldid bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment, fieldid bigint(20), subfieldorder tinyint(4) NOT NULL default '0', subfieldcode char(1) NOT NULL default '', subfieldvalue varchar(255) default NULL, valuebloblink bigint(20) default NULL, PRIMARY KEY (subfieldid), KEY (fieldid) ); Here are the results of my benchmark: getdata-steve: 0:08.29 0:08.36 0:08.24 0:08.25 0:08.28 getdata-sergey: 0:07.96 0:07.86 0:07.88 0:07.87 0:07.98 Times shown are for retrieving 2000 random records from a database of 5000 entries. It's close, but Sergey's schema is marginally faster, and unarguably better SQL, so let's go with splitting tag and subfield tables. Note that I didn't use 80,000 records in my benchmark this time, mainly because I didn't want to wait to generate a database that large. With only 5000 entries in the database, mysqld was able to cache the entire database in ram on my test machine. There was basically no hard drive access during the benchmark (after I ran it a couple of times to make sure all the data was cached). Before the data was all cached, the lookups were taking more like 12-15 seconds for 2000 records. Steve.

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Order from Chaos, maybe
by Nicholas Rosasco 29 May '02

29 May '02

After seeing Rachel's (thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou for that info. It seriously demystifys some things for me at least) wiki posted Katipo Plan, I have gone and Japanese chef'd the Roadmap (see the Sliced and Diced link off the original) to reflect her comments and (hopefully) Katipo's priorities/client requests ... particularly her (painfully correct) "ack! you want one release manager to handle all of _that_" line of thought. My hope was to divvy it into each version (yes, they are un-numbered... if someone wants to go back and adjust, go ahead) getting a major and a minor goal. Major features are usually things like MARC, minor things like shelf lists. The only exception of the moment is the current Katipo version, which has all kinds of nifty things, including the early (and highly groovy) templating and info-display-options-controls stuff. Is Jeremy on the devel list? Rachel, any comments (esp on if I've got the Katipan bullet points right?)? Ref'd: http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=RachelsKatipoPlan New: http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=SlicedAndDiced Old: http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=KohaRoadmap [The old is intact, for the moment, for comparison reasons, and anti-stupidity reasons (ie, to prevent me from losing a feature in cutting and pasting)] Nick

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Katipo Koha projects on the Koha developers site
by Rachel Hamilton-Williams 29 May '02

29 May '02

Hi I've made a list of the projects that Katipo has "on the books" for koha over the next month to six weeks at http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=RachelsKatipoPlan Jeremy is our project manager on these jobs, so I've asked him to do an update on it. My thoughts at the moment are that it would probably be useful for people to see what the "spec" for each project is, and to issue any warning etc about duplicate work or whatever.

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Re: [Koha-devel] Nominees
by Rosalie Blake 26 May '02

26 May '02

On 23 May 2002, at 15:05, Pat Eyler wrote: > > If you've been mentioned for (or are interested in) the Benevolent > Dictator post, would you mind dropping either a 'thank you, no' or a > candidacy-comments email to the list? Just so we know who is > interested and who wants off any potential ballots before next > Thursday? I have picked myself up off the floor, and stopped giggling hysterically. Thank you for the nomination, I am very flattered to have been considered, but I don't think I'm the person for the job of Dictator, Benevolent or otherwise. I will get the Users' manual done, but I lack the technical knowledge for the main job. Rosalie Blake

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Need help on CVS branches
by Alan Millar 25 May '02

25 May '02

Hi- I'm confused on how to work on the 1.2 branch. I've been reading the docs at cvsbook.red-bean.com, but it doesn't match with what I'm seeing in the koha cvs. I made a new directory to pull my stuff into: mkdir koha-cvs-12dev cd koha-cvs-12dev If I do this: cvs checkout -r rel-1-2 koha then I get files that are definitely snapshots from a week ago, but the cvs docs imply that any changes I make will go back into the main branch. Also, I can't get the koha-html directory; it says it is getting it but doesn't create anything If I do this: cvs -b rel_1_2 checkout koha I get koha, and I can get koha-html too, but the files are all the latest main branch versions. Help! What am I missing here? Thanks. - Alan -- ---- Alan Millar --==> am12(a)bolis.com <==--

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OpenBook
by Nicholas Rosasco 24 May '02

24 May '02

As an FYI, I checked the address I keep for queries from the FAQ, and low and behold, someone handed me a pointer to the openbook technical beta tarball, and said he was interested in advancing the project. I said we were moving to incorporate most of their ideas, anyway, and that as far as I knew it was dead. Idly, we may eventually want to write some sort of conversion util so these people can move to Koha. I'd suggest if we had a new developer show up we might "start them off" on such a thing. Disclaimer: Just a thought (from someone busily investigating the fridge with one hand, and typing with the other). Sooner or later I'll arrange for the tarball to live in our CVS tree, with a Big Ole' Note saying it isn't supported. Nick

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[Fwd: Paul Poulain (Kohla)]
by Chris Cormack 24 May '02

24 May '02

-----Forwarded Message----- > From: ccn info <ccn.informatique(a)libertysurf.fr> > To: chris(a)katipo.co.nz > Subject: Paul Poulain (Kohla) > Date: 19 May 2002 19:13:51 +0200 > > Hello, > > Paul Poulain was hospitalized. It's not very important but he can't repply > you and Koha developpement list for a week. May you forward this new to the > list ( it's important for Steve !!). > Thank you very much > > R. Salmon -- Chris Cormack chris(a)katipo.co.nz Programmer 025 500 579 Katipo Communications www.katipo.co.nz

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Nominees
by Nicholas Rosasco 23 May '02

23 May '02

If you've been mentioned for (or are interested in) the Benevolent Dictator post, would you mind dropping either a 'thank you, no' or a candidacy-comments email to the list? Just so we know who is interested and who wants off any potential ballots before next Thursday? Thanks Nick

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