June 2007 - Koha-devel - lists.koha-community.org

Koha Day Report
by Joshua M. Ferraro 21 Jun '07

21 Jun '07

Hi everyone, Well, our first Koha day went off swimingly, got lots of project stuff accomplished, met some new people, and had loads of fun. But starting at 9:00am on a Sunday is just nutty for the US team, so we've decided to give ourselves a break and pick it up at noon next week :-). Feel free to join us this Sunday starting at 12:00pm EST. So ... it's really amazing what can be accomplished in a day, here are the highlights: We met some great new folks: Frederic from France, Luis from Peru, gganno the librarian from Mali Africa, bureado, lloyd from the UK, and jamesa. Mason investigated automatic testing with Selenium, which will really be helpful for QA testing. Also spent some time on bugzilla, cleaning some stuff up. Russ hacked on the mailman pages on the koha website, making them prettier and had some productive discussions with Tina about improvements to the koha.org site. Plan is to continue the discussions week after next. Chris actually blogged about his Koha day: http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=meetingnotes07july02 If you were watching CVS you'll notice chris committed a bunch of test scripts; and if you were watching the wiki, there's quite a bit of technical documentation added as well. Randy took a look at the koha.org site and talked about improvements to be made from a project image standpoint; he also spent some time evaluating forum software and concluded that phpbb is probably the way to go Tina and Sara spent some time doing usability testing on the koha.org site and the koha interfaces. Also played around with some new project -specific graphics, mostly related to the koha.org website Finally, I worked on the 3.0 roadmap and read the Producing Open Source book, trying to glean some ideas for improving the project's release theory. i also worked a bit on the translation site, having some issues with the latest release's translation script I plan to hack further on next week. -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

2 1

Koha Developers' Meeting Minutes for June 18 2007
by Joshua M. Ferraro 21 Jun '07

21 Jun '07

ROLL CALL: ryan, paul, toins, tumer, thd, cm, kyle, jbrice, russel, pecisk, sanspach notably missing: hdl, chris, slef NEW MEMBERS, INTRODUCTIONS Crawford County Federated Library System welcomed to the dev chat. CCFLS launched their Koha system last month at their biggest library is running strong and looking forward to 8 more libraries joining later this year. Welcomed Pecisk to the community, he's a linux admin and developer and a big fan of OSS. Looking to start with translating and testing and move to development long-term GENERAL DEVELOPER NEWS Paul reports that 2 libraries are up and running on the soon-to-be 3.0 version of koha; the French team has also launched a new French bug tracker that will assist with French libraries reporting bugs; SAN-OP has published a RFP for a new acquisitions module; one more large public library in New Caledonia has signed up to switch to Koha in 2007. A French Non-Profit Organization for Koha has been created, called KohaLA Tumer reports a windows installable file for the NEU version of Koha. http://library.neu.edu.tr/cgi-bbin/koha/opac-downloads The Parliament library of Turkey plans to install Koha in about a month GIT DISTRIBUTED VERSION CONTROL + VERSION 3.0 RELEASE PLANS Kados described LibLime's adoption of Git internally for distributed version control and proposed moving the Koha code to CVS; developers decided that it was mainly up to the heavy committers and since all were in attendence we decided it's a go. LibLime team is responsible for pulling it off and providing good documentation for what the new procedures are, etc. kados described a proposed change to the release theory of the project: time-based releases. The theory is to do 6 releases a year broken into three types of releases: alpha,beta,stable. alpha - maybe some bugs, feature freeze, please test beta - most bugs fixed, we think it's stable, please test stable - tested, in production at some places Q: what if a bug appears in a sept-stable version that is discovered in, say, november? A: we release the stable version with the bug fix, so if the buggy release is 2.2.10, we releas 2.2.10b Q: how will we handle major new features that could not be done in just 6 months ? A:they can be created on a branch and merged when they are ready. Q:how will we handle when two teams are working on a similar feature at the same time? A: lots of options, probably best to make something complex like acquisitions a plugin so someone can use whatever acq module they want. best to make clear intention of developing a new module on the koha-devel list; discuss as much as possible with other interested parties; share the results. VERSION 2.2 RELEASE PLANS problem with rel_2_2 branch is that some changes added were only added to the npl templates. To avoid having a 2.2 and a 2.4, LibLime agreed to commit all changes made to default templates too and to make sure everything's working with both templates. Goal is to have 2.2.10 working with both templates and based on rel_2_2. COPYRIGHT CONVENTIONS We decided to discuss this further on-list, thd agreed to post some explainations of why there are some problems with the existing thread. OPENCATALOGER Toins previewed the OpenCataloger project, which is a new cataloging tool created to work independently from Koha, but also integrate with it. It's designed with professional catalogers in mind and has a more standard MARC editor look and feel. Well, very productive meeting folks, looking forward to the next one. Feel free to correct or add to my summary if I got something wrong or ommitted. Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

1 0

Announcing Koha Project Day
by Joshua M. Ferraro 17 Jun '07

17 Jun '07

Hi all, The management team here at LibLime is happy to announce a new initiative to foster community development and growth of the Koha project. As of this week, _every_ Sunday is Koha Project Day here at LibLime (for our NZ staff, this translates into Monday). Of course, throughout the week, we LibLimers spend the majority of our time working for our customers: writing specifications, doing development work, implementation, and support. Koha Project Day gives us a chance to give back to you -- the community that makes all of this possible! Barring any urgent support requests, or last-minute proposals due, we're planning to focus our energy entirely on the Koha Project itself during Koha Project Day -- every week. We'd like to extend the invitation to you, dear community. Join us any time on any Sunday and pitch in. Or, alternatively, pick a regular day/time that you find convenient and announce it to the rest of the community. It's strictly voluntary of course (for our staff too), so if you're unable to participate, we won't hold a grudge :-). But if you're able, join us and help out, there's plenty to do. Speaking of which, what is there to do? Glad you asked. Here's just a partial list: * organize and write documentation * write specifications for new proposed features * write technical documentation for existing Koha features * respond to questions/comments on the Koha lists * test features and report bugs * fix bugs :-) * read through the code and make comments * translate Koha into your native language * write that new feature you thought of * talk to the developers and tell them how to improve Koha Where is all of this happening? Well, you can join us in real time on the #koha channel on irc.katipo.co.nz. If you've not used IRC before, and you're running Windows, give mIRC a shot: http://www.mirc.com/ Well, that sums it up. Our first Koha Project Day starts tomorrow morning at 9:00am here in Ohio and runs for 15 hours to 5:00pm in New Zealand. If you're around, pop in and say hello :-) Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

1 0

Naming Conventions
by Joshua M. Ferraro 17 Jun '07

17 Jun '07

Hi all, A while back, I posed a question to these lists asking what the naming conventions were in your library for referring to patrons/ borrowers/users/etc. Thank you all for responding! The overwhelming majority of you said that you use the term 'patrons' most frequently. As a result, I suggest we change the naming convention within Koha's default templates to represent that majority. Some of you had feedback on other naming conventions as well. For instance, several said that 'check-out' and 'check-in' were preferred terms over 'issue' and 'return'. I've gotten the same feedback from quite a few libraries in my demos around North America. So, I'd also like to propose we adjust the default templates to reflect that majority. Of course, with our flexible translation framework, it's a fairly trivial procedure to change the wording in your local installation, if you prefer the current conventions. Any objections? Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

1 0

news from France
by Paul POULAIN 15 Jun '07

15 Jun '07

Hello world, There are 2 libraries in france that are running koha "3.0", from head CVS repository. One is a migration from Koha 2.2 The tools & method to migrate are working quite good now (I mean at least in UNIMARC). I've written some directions on the wiki. I also have written (in french) a doc that describes all new features. It's available on www.koha-fr.org (documentation section) It's provided in PDF. If someone volunteers to do a french => english translation, just ask for the OpenOffice version. Just note that it's 33 pages long... (with a lot of screenshots -in french too-, but still a lot of text) -- Paul POULAIN et Henri Damien LAURENT Consultants indépendants en logiciels libres et bibliothéconomie (http://www.koha-fr.org) Tel : 04 91 31 45 19

1 0

OpenURL link resolver
by Frédéric 15 Jun '07

15 Jun '07

Hi, Has anybody worked on a link resolver integration to Koha? Did you have any contact in this direction with academic libraries? An open source piece of software like CUFTS seems to be well suited for such an integration: http://cufts.lib.sfu.ca/ Any idea on the subject? Thanks. -- Frédéric

2 1

zebra for multi-marc
by long_sam.tw 13 Jun '07

13 Jun '07

hi,programmers zebra support multi-marc ? i run koha for mysql can support coexistent marcs (marc21 & unimarc). marc21 http://lit145.lacc.fju.edu.tw/cgi-bin/koha/opac-MARCdetail.pl?bib=15 unimarc http://lit145.lacc.fju.edu.tw/cgi-bin/koha/opac-MARCdetail.pl?bib=17 laxendion ___________________________________________________ 您的生活即時通－溝通、娛樂、生活、工作一次搞定！ http://messenger.yahoo.com.tw/

5 4

Test koha-git repository
by MJ Ray 12 Jun '07

12 Jun '07

I have created a temporary koha git repository from CVS at git://serene.ttllp.co.uk/opt/koha.git/ which you may like to test. Apologies for the ugly name. The repository updates from CVS around 15:00 UTC daily. There is a HTTP copy available - please ask. It's nasty to use, but it can slip through more firewalls. An initial download with a command like git clone git://serene.ttllp.co.uk/opt/koha.git/ koha-git downloads about 35Mb of repository. For comparison, the CVS repository is 260Mb, but you download only about 5Mb and use 45Mb of disk for each checkout you work on. If you want to work on another branch with git, you can switch with git checkout or clone your local repository and avoid another download. Please work on local branches and not one of the CVS-created branches, else it might get very messy when you next run "git pull" or similar. To work on a local branch, first find the remote branch with git branch -r or a tag with git tag -l then check it out with something like git checkout origin/rel_2_2 and you might get a note which suggests to make a local branch from that with a command like git checkout -b my-22 To check where you are, use git show-branch. Check the man. Note that the above commands may or may not work with git 1.4. If unsure, check man git before running. Let me know if it breaks for you ;-) -- MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Experienced webmaster-developers for hire http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ Also: statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder, workers co-op. Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/

1 0

Koha Developers' Meeting
by Joshua M. Ferraro 09 Jun '07

09 Jun '07

Hi folks, OK, I've compiled the list of suggested times and unfortunately, there are lots of conflicts (not surprising, we're international after all). The best date/time seems to be Monday June 18th at 19:00 GST/UTC. Here's the time in your area: http://tinyurl.com/2avkyz Here's a link to the agenda I've put up. Please add to it as you see fit: http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=meetingnotes07jun18 Also, I've been thinking long and hard today about recent growth in our community and specifically the upcoming release (3.0). I'll be sending some mails through this weekend about some ideas I've got for how to take this community to the next level, so hang tight for those. Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf(a)liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS

2 2

Check Out Problems
by Casey Rosenberg 06 Jun '07

06 Jun '07

Hi, I have just installed Koha (Windows). When I go to checkout to a patron, it works, but when something is checkout to the patron, they can't view there account online. But the instant its checked back in, they can view there account. What is wrong? I have koha version 2.2.8 Thanks! Casey rosenbergcj(a)gmail.com

1 0