May 2020 - Koha-devel - lists.koha-community.org

How to make self-referential URLs in Koha
by dcook＠prosentient.com.au 30 Jan '23

30 Jan '23

Hi all, With some recent code, I've been using creating self-referential URL in Koha using CGI->url(), and passing it as a value. With CGI, the URL is correct (ie starting with /cgi-bin/koha). With Plack, it's not, because the OPAC is mounted as "/opac". I worked around this by rewriting the self-referential URL in my code, but I was wondering if anyone else had any thoughts on this. I've noticed there are a few places in Koha where we use CGI->url() and I'm guessing we may have unexpected bugs in Plack-enabled Koha as a result. Of course, one workaround would be to have /opac and /intranet aliases or URL rewriting in Apache, so that the self-referential URLs created by Plack still end up resolving. I wonder if that's the easiest path forward. In the past, I have wondered if we could get rid of "/cgi-bin/koha" as a path prefix all together (especially as cgi-bin scares security tools), but it's so deeply embedded in Koha at this point that it seems a huge task to replace it. Anyway, just throwing that out there. David Cook Systems Librarian Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

6 8

String Freeze Notice
by Joy Nelson 12 Aug '22

12 Aug '22

Greetings! Just a quick note that string freeze will go into effect at the end of day 12/16/2019 for the maintenance branches. Maintenance releases scheduled for the 23rd. Translations can begin on the 17th. Thanks! -- Joy Nelson President, Koha Division ByWater Solutions <http://bywatersolutions.com> Support and Consulting for Open Source Software Phone/Fax (888)900-8944 What is Koha? <http://bywatersolutions.com/what-is-koha/>

3 3

Koha 20.05.00 Released
by Renvoize, Martin 09 Jun '20

09 Jun '20

Hello Everyone, It is with great pleasure I am able to announce the release of Koha 20.05, a major release of the Koha open source integrated library system. This release includes 13 new features, 275 enhancements, 592 bugfixes. Please see the release notes for further details: https://koha-community.org/koha-20-05-released/ It is the work of many librarians, developers and community members who have donated a huge number of hours to keep the project moving forward. My thanks go out to all who contributed. This is my final release as a release manager and I'd like to extend my personal thanks to a fantastic team. Special thanks go out to Mason James, Tomas Cohen and Jonathan Druart, all who stepped in during the final weeks of the cycle to ensure the packaging would work as expected for Debian 10 as well as finding and fixing bugs right up to the very end of the cycle. I cannot overstate what a great team I've had behind me this cycle and I feel we have achieved a huge amount. Debian packages, will be available on the standard community repositories soon having been tested via our beta channels for the past two weeks. Many thanks, *Martin Renvoize* <https://www.ptfs-europe.com> Development Team Manager Community Release Manager (19.11, 20.05) *Phone:* +44 (0) 1483 378728 *Mobile:* +44 (0) 7725 985 636 *Email:* martin.renvoize(a)ptfs-europe.com *Fax:* +44 (0) 800 756 6384 www.ptfs-europe.com Registered in the United Kingdom No. 06416372 VAT Reg No. 925 7211 30 The information contained in this email message may be privileged, confidential and protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, any dissemination, distribution or copying is strictly prohibited. If you think that you have received this email message in error, please email the sender at info(a)ptfs-europe.com

5 4

update MARC::Transform in debian.koha-community.org
by Stéphane Delaune 08 Jun '20

08 Jun '20

Hello, I'm Stéphane Delaune (aka reiveune) from BibLibre I am the developer of the Perl module MARC::Transform ( https://metacpan.org/pod/MARC::Transform ), this module is in version 0.003008 since april but, in debian.koha-community.org, the version is only 0.003006 that is 5 years old (2 versions late, including a bugfix) I would like to know if someone is able to update this package in debian.koha-community.org (and in https://packages.qa.debian.org/libm/libmarc-transform-perl.html on which the version is 0.003007) thank you in advance Stéphane Delaune

3 4

Koha Community Newsletter: May 2020
by Koha Newsletter 30 May '20

30 May '20

The Koha Community Newsletter for May 2020 is here: https://koha-community.org/koha-community-newsletter-may-2020/ Many thanks to the folks who submitted articles and news to this month's newsletter. Please feel free to email me with any corrections or suggestions. -- Chad Roseburg Editor, Koha Community Newsletter

1 0

Alerting users to breaking changes / backwards incompatibility
by dcook＠prosentient.com.au 29 May '20

29 May '20

Hi all, I was just thinking how a lot of SQL reports will return unexpected results when we merge the deleted* tables with their live/active counterparts. What do people think about a modal popup in the reports (on a per user basis) alerting them to how they may need to update their reports following an upgrade which changes reporting behaviour? I'm not 100% sure how we'd do it, but it's something we could re-use through much of the Koha staff client. Or maybe we could raise a flag in the borrower row during an upgrade, and when they log into the staff client, they're presented with a "You need to know." kind of page. After all, users aren't going to be reading release notes, and sysadmins doing upgrades aren't necessarily going to do the best job communicating to every single staff user about what they need to know in an upgrade. But that's easier said than done too, especially when you're upgrading past multiple versions. Anyway, just putting it out there. As you can see, I haven't thought about it too deeply yet. David Cook Systems Librarian Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

3 5

Bad koha-common.postinst in 19.11.05
by dcook＠prosentient.com.au 28 May '20

28 May '20

Hi all, Anyone else getting this in their 19.11.05 upgrade output: /var/lib/dpkg/info/koha-common.postinst: 155: [: !log4perl_component: unexpected operator Looks like a little typo David Cook Systems Librarian Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

4 3

20.05.00 Alpha release
by Renvoize, Martin 22 May '20

22 May '20

Hi all, As we've got a number of improvements in the translations and packaging processes in this release I have built an alpha to test prior to a full release in the coming days. If you have time to work through any test upgrades/installs using the nightly Debian repository it would be greatly appreciated to get your feedback. The repository is available at http://apt.kohaaloha.com/koha-nightly/. Things to look out for: * Debian 10 Support! * Installer process and translations of default data * Circulation rules being added correctly during onboarding * Logging and log file permissions Any feedback given over the next few days will be taken into consideration before I build the release notes and officially release to the wider world. Many thanks, *Martin Renvoize* <https://www.ptfs-europe.com> Development Team Manager Community Release Manager (19.11, 20.05) *Phone:* +44 (0) 1483 378728 *Mobile:* +44 (0) 7725 985 636 *Email:* martin.renvoize(a)ptfs-europe.com *Fax:* +44 (0) 800 756 6384 www.ptfs-europe.com Registered in the United Kingdom No. 06416372 VAT Reg No. 925 7211 30 The information contained in this email message may be privileged, confidential and protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, any dissemination, distribution or copying is strictly prohibited. If you think that you have received this email message in error, please email the sender at info(a)ptfs-europe.com

2 2

Plugin Security, Plugin Repositories, etc
by dcook＠prosentient.com.au 22 May '20

22 May '20

Hi all, I was doing my morning reading, and noticed that Microsoft have a Windows Package Manager in the works (https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21264739/microsoft-windows-package-manag er-preview-download). While that might not be newsworthy for many people interested in FOSS, you might reconsider when you look at what they're doing for a community metadata repository: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs Here's an example of a metadata file for 7-zip in that repository: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/blob/master/manifests/7Zip/7Zip/19. 0.0.yaml. It includes a URL to the installer and a SHA256 hash for integrity checking. Now according to https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli, it doesn't look like they're using that Github repository as *the* metadata source repository. Indeed after a bit of digging it appears that the actual default metadata source is https://winget.azureedge.net/cache/source.msix, which contains a SQLite database of metadata (index.db). I think that's an interesting model. We could use http://gitlab.com/koha-community/plugins like https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs where people could submit pull requests to get plugin metadata added to the repository. That would enable there to be a basic level of curation. We could then use something like https://plugins.koha-community.org/ to serve actual metadata (in whatever standardish format we want) to either the Koha web UI (and a Debian package Koha CLI tool like "koha-plugin-get" which make plugin deployment and maintenance potentially easier for sysadmins). There could be an automated process for updating plugins.koha-community.org from http://gitlab.com/koha-community/plugins too. People would be free to point to other plugin metadata repositories (e.g. vendor-specific repos), but by default it would be set up for the Koha Community plugin metadata repository. In terms of security, we could mimic Debian's Apt model of signing the plugin metadata manifest. That way, when setting up a plugin metadata repository in Koha, all you need to do is import a public key/cert to get trusted access to the repo. With the Koha Community repository, we could bake that public key/cert into Koha releases, so it would be seamless for end users. The hardest part of this process would be settling on what metadata manifest format to use for https://plugins.koha-community.org/. Actually, the hardest part would be trying to maintain some kind of backward compatibility. Maybe that's best done by rebranding the current plugin model as "Legacy Plugins" or "Manual Plugins" and then just building a separate web UI for the Repository model. We could re-use the same internals. We could also have separate controls for enabling/disabling "Manual Plugins" vs "Repository Plugins", so that vendors could provide access to plugins via a repository but prevent people from uploading random plugins from the Internet. Anyway, food for thought. I'm happy to do a lot of this work (probably in my personal time rather than work time), but I'd want to make sure there is some buy-in from other vendors and Koha plugin creators first. David Cook Systems Librarian Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

1 0

Koha release 19.11.06
by Joy Nelson 22 May '20

22 May '20

Greetings! The Koha community is proud to announce the release of Koha 19.11.06. It includes 23 enhancements and 122 bug fixes. The full release notes are available at https://koha-community.org/koha-19-11-06-release/ Debian packages will be updated within a few days. -- Joy Nelson President, Koha Division ByWater Solutions <http://bywatersolutions.com> Support and Consulting for Open Source Software Phone/Fax (888)900-8944 What is Koha? <http://bywatersolutions.com/what-is-koha/>

1 0