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

From the Kaitiaki
by Pat Eyler 27 Sep '02

27 Sep '02

Sep 27, 2002 To the Koha community Welcome, This bi-week's edition of my newsletter is a bit longer than normal. I think this is an accurate reflection of the increased pace of work being done on Koha. We've got new developers working on Koha, new libraries investigating Koha, new projects within Koha, and more public awareness of Koha. I hope that I can do justice to all of the efforts that are going on. As usual, if I managed to miss something, or if I get something wrong, my apologies. Please don't hesitate to contact me at kaitiaki(a)koha.org if you have any questions, concerns, or large piles of money you'd like to give away ;) 1.2 Work is moving along on 1.2.3, with RC14 having been recently released. Steve has also made several improvements to the Koha Demo CD. It is now capable of running a client to demonstrate Koha on a single box. We're still looking for testers and feedback. If you haven't tried the CD yet, please give it a whirl and let us know what you think. It would be nice to be able to clean up any problems, and to develop some solid documentation for it, but we'll need everyones help. 1.4 1.3.0 has been released! This is a major step in the development of the 1.4 series. For the first time, general developers and testers can start making use of the expanded API available with Koha. At this point, there are no user visible changes but new 1.4 centric tools should start appearing in 1.3 releases soon. Please note, the 1.3 series is *not* intended for production use. It is alpha software and should be treated as such. On the other hand, if you have the hardware and time, we'd love to hear about your experiences testing 1.3.0 or any of the 1.3 series releases. Documentation Andrew Aranson is a new contributor and has been working on developer level documentation (called POD). Ewan Tempero is also working on developer level documentation, his efforts have been targeted at developing use cases describing the expected behavior of various programs. As Andrew and Ewan produce more and more information, it will make it significantly easier for new developers to get started with Koha. Nicholas Rosasco has also stepped up the pace on his documentation efforts. He's getting ready to make another release and has asked for final comments from anyone who's read it. (If you're listed in the credits, he's especially interested in hearing about any mistakes or typos.) Translations We've just had a volunteer from South Africa step up to work on Koha. With the recent move toward Open Source Software by the South African government (see http://www.oss.gov.za/ for more details), we hope to see users, translators, and developers coming on-board. The french Koha list is becoming much more active. There are now over thirty users on the list, and email is flying around at an astounding rate. If you're interested in translations, please get involved. The following groups are currently active: French translation fr.koka.org German translation de.koha.org To subscribe to a mailing list for one of these languages, please send email to koha-subscribe@<language site> (koha-subscribe(a)fr.koha.org for example). Bear in mind, discussion on these lists is in the native language of the list, please respect this. We're hoping to get es.koha.org and za.koha.org running soon. General translation discussions should occur (in english) on the koha-translate mailing list hosted at sourceforge. This list also receives documents to be translated (such as this one). If you want to translate a Koha announcement, please contact the author. If you want to translate one of these newsletters, please do. I ask only that you send me a copy of the translation so that I can post it to an appropriate website. Community Last week we got a mention in the Biblio-tech monthly review (see http://www.biblio-tech.com/ for the story). Rosalie Blake (of HLT) presented a talk on OSS and Koha to her local library association. We seem to be cropping up in the press more and more often. If you're at all interested in helping keep us in the public eye (and getting a bit of press for yourself), please contact me to discuss a press release covering your recent decision to adopt Koha or your implementation of Koha. Thanks to those who responded to me about Linux, OSS, or Library conferences. We're coordinating presentations now for at least four appearances. We'd welcome more though, so please feel free to contact me if you're interested. (Even making a presentation to a Linux or Perl users group would help.) There's also been another investment in Koha development. An anonymous patron has stepped forward to sponsor a core developer's work on extending Koha. With more organizations catching the vision of Koha as a cooperative effort, I think we'll be seeing more of this happen in the days to come. 120 day review Well, I've been serving as the Kaitiaki for about 120 days now, so I thought I might do a quick self evaluation and comparison against my stated goals. When I initially talked about taking on the role, I laid out goals in three areas; Code Cleanliness, Feature Inclusion, and Koha Uptake. I'll address each of these separately. Code Cleanliness: I had (and still have) a vision of a code base that's easy to read, easy to modify, and easy to verify. There have been a couple of improvements in this area, but most of them have occurred in spite of my inaction. I'm encouraged to see efforts at writing tests and programmer documentation, and plan on encouraging this effort as we move forward. Feature Inclusion: Koha has certainly seen a number of new additions; the installer, the upgrade script, templating, etc. I hope that the RFPs from Nelsonville will spur both more development and greater sponsorship from other libraries. With the recent start of the 1.3 release series, I think we'll be seeing a lot more changes soon. Koha Uptake: I think this has been the place where I've really come through on my vision. I had wanted to put Koha in front of a lot of eye balls. With stories in a variety of press outlets, press releases, and planned presence at several conferences in the next six months, I think that we've really begun to establish ourselves as a valid option in the eyes of libraries. Overall, I think I've been successful in my role thus far. I'm honored to have the opportunity to work with so many talented and wonderful people. I'd like to especially thank Chris Cormack (the 1.2 Release Manager), Paul Poulain (the 1.4 Release Manager), and Nicolas Rosasco (the Marketing & Recruiting Manager) -- without their efforts the last 120 days would not have gone nearly as well. I hope that you're as excited about our progress as I am. I really do think that we're looking at a really bright future. happy hacking, Pat Eyler Kaitiaki/manager the Koha project

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Problems with 1.3.0
by Tom Schutter 26 Sep '02

26 Sep '02

There seems to be a problem with the 1.3.0 tarball on SourceForge. I have done a virgin install on a new machine. If I click on Acquisitions and I get an Internal Server Error. The following is appended to /var/log/apache/koha-error_log: Can't locate MARC/Record.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /var/www/koha/intranet/modules /usr/local/lib/perl/5.6.1 /usr/local/share/perl/5.6.1 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.6.1 /usr/share/perl/5.6.1 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at /var/www/koha/intranet/modules/C4/Biblio.pm line 100. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /var/www/koha/intranet/modules/C4/Biblio.pm line 100. Compilation failed in require at /var/www/koha/intranet/cgi-bin/loadmodules.pl line 26. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /var/www/koha/intranet/cgi-bin/loadmodules.pl line 26. [Fri Sep 27 17:47:17 2002] [error] [client 192.168.1.18] Premature end of script headers: /var/www/koha/intranet/cgi-bin/loadmodules.pl The same message occurs if the systempreferences/acquisitions is set to simple or normal. "find /var/www/koha -name MARC" returns nothing. "tar tvzf /tmp/koha-1.3.0.tar.gz | grep MARC/" returns nothing. # ls -l /tmp/koha-1.3.0.tar.gz -rw------- 1 tom develop 1958850 Sep 26 13:39 /tmp/koha-1.3.0.tar.gz The file size on http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=16466 is the same. Any ideas? -- Tom Schutter (mailto:tom@platte.com) Platte River Associates, Inc. (http://www.platte.com)

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Free Software in .au government
by Pat Eyler 26 Sep '02

26 Sep '02

For the .au representatives here, it looks like there may be an opportunity to get a bit of visibility at: http://www.itnews.com.au/story.cfm?ID=10869 If you decide to go (hopefully to talk up Koha), please let us know how things go. (Anyone with 'Koha inside gov't' want to give some pointers?) -pate Pat Eyler Kaitiaki/manager migrant Linux sys admin the Koha project ruby, shell, and perl geek http://www.koha.org http://pate.eylerfamily.org

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commissioned work
by Tonnesen Steve 26 Sep '02

26 Sep '02

I've been commissioned to do some work by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. I thought in the interests of transparancy I'd detail here what this donor needs added to Koha: 1. Optimization of the bulk marc record importing tool to facilitate importing and ongoing merging of a 500,000 record database. 2. Ability to group collections somewhat arbitrarily. The customer in this case is a group of 7 school districts with approximately 200 schools. The customer will need to see the location of an item by district and school, and also be able to search the collections of individual districts and schools. I'm hoping to use the Virtual Bookshelves concept to facilitate this feature. Steve Tonnesen

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Fwd: [Koha-devel] commissioned work
by COURYHOUSE＠aol.com 26 Sep '02

26 Sep '02

> > > very important! > > ed! > > >> Ability to group collections somewhat arbitrarily. The customer in >> this case is a group of 7 school districts with approximately 200 >> schools. The customer will need to see the location of an item by >> district and school, and also be able to search the collections of >> individual districts and schools. I'm hoping to use the Virtual >> Bookshelves concept to facilitate this feature. >> >> >

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Fwd: [Koha-devel] commissioned work
by COURYHOUSE＠aol.com 26 Sep '02

26 Sep '02

In a message dated 9/26/2002 9:51:13 AM US Mountain Standard Time, COURYHOUSE writes: > Subj:Re: [Koha-devel] commissioned work > Date:9/26/2002 9:51:13 AM US Mountain Standard Time > From:<A HREF="mailto:COURYHOUSE">COURYHOUSE</A> > To:<A HREF="mailto:tonnesen@cmsd.bc.ca">tonnesen(a)cmsd.bc.ca</A> > > > > Kudos Steve! > > >> Subj:[Koha-devel] commissioned work >> Date:9/26/2002 9:36:27 AM US Mountain Standard Time >> From:<A HREF="mailto:tonnesen@cmsd.bc.ca">tonnesen(a)cmsd.bc.ca</A> >> To:<A HREF="mailto:koha-devel@lists.sourceforge.net">koha-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net</A> >> Sent from the Internet >> >> >> >> >> I've been commissioned to do some work by a donor who wishes to remain >> anonymous. I thought in the interests of transparancy I'd detail here >> what this donor needs added to Koha: >> >> >> 1. Optimization of the bulk marc record importing tool to facilitate >> importing and ongoing merging of a 500,000 record database. >> >> 2. Ability to group collections somewhat arbitrarily. The customer in >> this case is a group of 7 school districts with approximately 200 >> schools. The customer will need to see the location of an item by >> district and school, and also be able to search the collections of >> individual districts and schools. I'm hoping to use the Virtual >> Bookshelves concept to facilitate this feature. >> >> >> Steve Tonnesen >> >> >> >> >> ------------------------------------------------------- >> This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek >> Welcome to geek heaven. >> http://thinkgeek.com/sf >> _______________________________________________ >> Koha-devel mailing list >

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Once again, please don't wait until the last minute
by Nicholas S. Rosasco 26 Sep '02

26 Sep '02

It is _that time again_ .... time to make the manual editor happy! As I begin to markup the first rounds of new goodies for the next edition of the manual (troubleshooting, transition from other opacs, and a tidied up installation section are started/in markup/close to ready, respectively) it is also time to make sure you are given your due.... namely, your entry in the credits file! If you are NOT IN HERE or SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH WHAT IS "AFTER THE COMMA" (description, that is) you need to email me. Posthaste. Last time I sent this out, I didn't get much in the way of response.... until we were trying to finish :) the manual for release hint hint I really would like to have this done first! Pat are we at the point where we should be crediting (besides french speakers) anyone from the nonenglish efforts? [Paul: I defer to you as to who on the french mailing list should go in....] -------------------------- Koha Credits Horowhenua Library Trust Rosalie Blake, Head of Libraries Jo Ransom Katipo Communications Rachel Hamilton-Williams, General Manager (Webmistress) Simon Blake, Technical Manager, Server Administrator Amanda Atkins, Operations Manager Chris Cormack, 1.2 release guru Olwen Williams Finlay Thompson Gynn Lomax Richard Anderson Jeremy Blake, Katipo Koha Project Manager Rebecca Holden, New Koha.org page Steve Tonnesen, MARC import/export guru Pawel Skuza, Polish Language porter Glen Stewart Paul Poulain, 1.4 release manager Pat Eyler, Kaitiaki Roger Buck Adam Thick Florian Bischof Sebastiaan Durand Andrew Hooper Mike Mylonas Mike Johnson Mike Hansen Nicolas Morin, French Translation/Traduction Française of the Documentation Nicholas Rosasco, Documentation Editor/Compiler -------------------------- On other, stranger notes, we seem to have been misfiled -- google puts us in the following category: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Graphic _Subsystems/Desktop_Environments/KDE/Productivity/?il=1

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RE: [Koha-devel] How may I be of assistance?
by Eyler, Patrick 24 Sep '02

24 Sep '02

> -----Original Message----- > From: Nicholas S. Rosasco [mailto:nsr@etome.net] > Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 11:27 AM > To: KohaDev > Subject: RE: [Koha-devel] How may I be of assistance? > > >Let me know if there are other areas that need (more) help, or how > I > >can help with the install process. > > I know that for the installer my (at least) eventual hopes were to > advance > it to the point where the "other options" (no virtual > hosts/rootless/etc) > were covered by it as well.... I'd sure like to see it cover other distros and other OSes (*BSD, Solaris, etc.) as well. -pate > > I don't know what others may be thinking on this point. > > Opinions? > Nick > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek > Welcome to geek heaven. > http://thinkgeek.com/sf > _______________________________________________ > Koha-devel mailing list > Koha-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/koha-devel

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Re: [Koha-cvs] CVS: koha/C4 Database.pm,1.6,1.7 Koha.pm,1.6,1.7 Output.pm,1.16,1.17 Search.pm,1.36,1.37
by Dorian Meid 24 Sep '02

24 Sep '02

Output.pm, Line 261: > +# FIXME - Use 'foreach my $var (...)' Not really. Used this before, but I need every single variable after exiting the loops and so hve to declare them outside the loop. Dorian

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FW: Koha 1.3.0 released (with message this time)
by Eyler, Patrick 24 Sep '02

24 Sep '02

Koha 1.3.0 has been released. This release marks the beginning of public development and testing of the MARC compliant Koha we've been Looking forward to. As the 1.3 releases stabilize and reach feature completion, they will become Koha 1.4. This is an alpha quality release only. *DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE IT IN PRODUCTION SYSTEMS* It may cause data corruption or loss, it may confuse patrons, it may cause books to refile themselves in strange places. *IT SHOULD BE USED FOR TESTING ONLY*. (I hope that's clear enough.) If you are want to use Koha in a production setting, please stick with the stable 1.2 release until the 1.3 series stabilizes enough for us to create Koha 1.4.0. Significant new features in this release include: * Data is stored natively in a MARC based format. * Multiple flavors of MARC are supported. * Enhanced API supports both the new MARC format and the older Koha specific format. Please note though, that from a users perspective, this release should look just like a 1.2 series release. All of the work so far has been in redesigning the data format and extending the API. User visible changes will be included once the infrastructure has stabilized. It is also important to note that the simple acquisition system is currently broken. *DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT USING IT* The full acquisition system works correctly. Paul Poulain Pat Eyler 1.4 Release manager Kaitiaki/manager the Koha project the Koha project

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