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

Review on Koha Order Module/plugin API
by Ola Andersson 08 Sep '20

08 Sep '20

Dear Koha Developers, Here in Sweden we have started a task group in the Swedish Koha User Group to build a Order module/plugin to Koha that allow automatic influx of order data directly from a book vendor into Koha. The API draft is described here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13EIWxTlN3Wo-8OtJuwu5serQu-dl-zdpK1qY5BN… We have had it posted for review in the Swedish user group - but we are thinking it would be valuable to get the larger Koha community to give feedback before we hire contractors to build the module/plugin. Please share thoughts on the API and how to best implement it in Koha from a developer/QA perspective. All comments are appreciated and anyone looking at the Google docs above can send comments/suggestions into the document. When the API is becoming more stable and comments have been looked at we could move it into the Koha wiki site. Please leave comments before 21 September 2020. /Swedish Koha User Group - the book vendor module/plugin task group

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Request for sign-off: component part records feature (Bug 11175)
by Joonas Kylmälä 08 Sep '20

08 Sep '20

Hi, there has been this long-standing feature pending from 2013 for Koha for listing component part records in the host record biblio details page. I have rescued the original patches by submitting follow-ups but now I haven't got any sign-offs for 2 months. I think the issue is that this needs developers to do the sign-off since the zebra index needs to be re-indexed to test this. So if you are a developer of a library that uses component part records I would like to ask you take a look at this bug 11175 [1] and sign-off if you just can! Thanks already beforehand! :) [1] https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=11175 -- Joonas Kylmälä Tietojärjestelmäasiantuntija Kansalliskirjasto Kirjastoverkkopalvelut PL 15 (Unioninkatu 36) 00014 Helsingin yliopisto

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Add ProxyTimeout to Plack Koha due to mod_cgi bug
by dcook＠prosentient.com.au 07 Sep '20

07 Sep '20

Hi all, Last week, I discovered a bug in Apache httpd's mod_cgi. Basically, it means that mod_cgi does not timeout until 2x the duration of TimeOut, while mod_proxy_http (used by Plack) times out after 1x the duration of TimeOut. You can see the details at https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=26400. The Apache community worked very quickly, and together we've resolved the bug, but I don't think Apache backport fixes. That said, there's been an open bug report in Debian for 5 years (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=780123) I'll send an email in telling them that this has been fixed upstream. I wouldn't count on a backport though. In any case, the real importance here is that we harmonize people's expectations. With Bug 15218, we started using CGI mode for certain long-running processes. It might be that this isn't 100% necessary in all cases, if we just increase the ProxyTimeout to match the effective TimeOut time of CGI processes. David Cook Software Engineer Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

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Is Indexdata's Zebra a dead project?
by dcook＠prosentient.com.au 04 Sep '20

04 Sep '20

Hi all, I just noticed that Indexdata doesn't provide Zebra packages past Debian Stretch: http://ftp.indexdata.dk/pub/zebra/debian/. The latest Ubuntu package is for 18.04 (Bionic): http://ftp.indexdata.dk/pub/zebra/ubuntu/ In fact, Zebra hasn't been updated since August 2018 according to the changelog: https://software.indexdata.com/zebra/doc/NEWS. In Debian, it looks like Debian 11 Bullseye will have the latest Zebra (2.1.4), so there is that at least. I guess people using Debian 10 Buster will either need to use the buggy Zebra (2.0.59) in Debian or maybe use the Stretch packages from Indexdata. But then from Bullseye onwards there will be the latest Zebra until Debian drops the package I guess. All the more reason to move more to Elasticsearch? David Cook Software Engineer Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

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Apache directive TimeOut works differently when using mod_cgi (CGI) vs mod_proxy_http (Plack)
by dcook＠prosentient.com.au 04 Sep '20

04 Sep '20

Hi all, While troubleshooting Apache TimeOut for Plack vs CGI (https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=26128) I discovered that Apache seems to respect TimeOut when measuring a timeout proxying requests to Plack. However, it actually *doubles* the time when running CGI scripts on its own. I've looked through the Apache httpd and apr source code, and it's not obvious to me at a glance why this happens, but I think it's important for us to realize this, because it means the solution presented by "Make processes that rely on background jobs run in CGI mode" https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=15218 might not always be necessary. Based on my investigation, it seems the reason some scripts work in CGI but not in Plack is simply because of the different way timeouts occur. If we just raise the ProxyTimeout to twice the value of TimeOut (ie change it to 600 to be 2*TimeOut), then we'll be getting the same behaviour. Of course, the real solution in these cases is still to use asynchronous processing via "Add a task queue" (https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=22417) In any case, I thought it was important to share my findings, because it means we might actually be able to reduce our dependency on CGI now even before Bug 22417 is pushed. Thank you, David Cook Software Engineer Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

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Strange Plack-related bug
by dcook＠prosentient.com.au 03 Sep '20

03 Sep '20

Hi all, I was running Koha Plack on OpenSuse (using CPANed libraries), and I noticed that creating a new authority would take me to /cgi-bin/koha/authorities/detail.pl?authid=1, which then spat out an error in my logs of "Subroutine build_tabs redefined at /path/to/koha/intranet/cgi-bin/authorities/detail.pl line 56." After that, it became impossible to create a new authority via /cgi-bin/koha/authorities/authorities.pl. Seemingly because the build_tabs subroutine had been redefined to be incompatible with authorities.tt. I noticed that this only affected my OpenSuse Koha. It didn't affect Debian or Ubuntu. That makes me think that it's due to an issue with the Plack libraries being used. On Ubuntu I was using 1.0047, on Debian I was using 1.0042, and on OpenSuse I was using 1.0039. My guess is that it's an issue with the older library, but I really don't know. Wondering if anyone else has encountered this particular issue. Same Koha code running on each OS, but yeah. the OpenSuse was having issues that the Debian/Ubuntu didn't. David Cook Software Engineer Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

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Koha Community Newsletter: August 2020
by Koha Newsletter 01 Sep '20

01 Sep '20

The Koha Community Newsletter for August 2020 is here: https://koha-community.org/koha-community-newsletter-august-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

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Add warning in IE that Koha does not support IE
by dcook＠prosentient.com.au 27 Aug '20

27 Aug '20

Hi all, I don't know about you, but I have received a lot of calls about Koha not working in IE 11. Now I think that it is wise that we no longer support IE 11, especially since Microsoft itself is dropping support for it in November 2020, but I think warning people is not a bad idea. I've opened https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=26305 to do just that. Keen to get feedback / signoffs. Cheers, David Cook Software Engineer Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

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Self-checkout uses issuing rules rather than renewal rules for renewals
by dcook＠prosentient.com.au 26 Aug '20

26 Aug '20

I had a librarian report that they got stuck in a loop when trying to renew overdue items via the self-checkout. I've written a patch at https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=26301, and I'm keen to get testers. The self-checkout isn't very straightforward, so I hope others can make sure I didn't miss anything. Doing checkouts and renewals looks good to me so far though. Cheers, David Cook Software Engineer Prosentient Systems 72/330 Wattle St Ultimo, NSW 2007 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

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Deploying Koha at scale
by Tomás 19 Aug '20

19 Aug '20

Hi folks. Theke Solutions has started a project some time ago, sponsored by ByWater Solutions to generate the tools and pipelines to provide a reliable Docker implementation for deploying Koha in production environments. We have just finished the housekeeping a few days ago so we are not embarrassed by our commit messages and leftovers :-D and want to propose it for community adoption anytime soon. The project lives here for now: https://gitlab.com/thekesolutions/koha-docker What you will find there is a Docker image that can be used to run any of the different Koha services/pieces on separate containers, or all inside a single one. We aimed to target different deployment scenarios, from a small library running it on a desktop computer to a multi-cluster K8s setup. A helm chart is part of the roadmap. You will notice there are a couple issues to be addressed [1]. For instance, the shipped docker-compose.yml is outdated regarding the MySQL/MariaDB server and we definitely need more on the README. Thanks to ByWater for supporting this effort, and now that people are talking about this, let's start the conversation \o/ [1] https://gitlab.com/thekesolutions/koha-docker/-/issues El jue., 11 jun. 2020 a las 4:52, <dcook(a)prosentient.com.au> escribió: > Hi all, > > For a long time, I've been thinking about how Koha could scale better, and > I'm wondering what other people are thinking about this topic. I think > Mengu > is probably the best expert on this topic that we have on Earth, so > especially curious about his input. > > It's relatively easy to add more Apache web servers, more MySQL nodes, and > more Elasticsearch nodes. but the same might not be said for other parts of > Koha like the following: > > 1. Zebra > a. In theory, you could load balance queries to a cluster of Zebra > listeners > b. But indexing updates to many Zebra databases could be tricky (I > don't know if Zebra's database can support many readers). I suppose you > could alter rebuild_zebra.pl to update multiple databases in a variety of > different ways. I imagine Mengu could speak to this, as I recall him > talking > once about needing to do work to make Zebra scale? > > 2. I'm not familiar enough with the SIP server to say > a. Off the top of my head, I think a TCP load balancer would be > good > enough here > > 3. Z3950 Responder? > a. I'm not familiar with this daemon > > 4. What about cronjobs? Only 1 instance should execute the cronjobs. > a. I suppose a person could disable cronjobs on all Koha nodes > except for 1? It wouldn't be very robust in terms of availability but it > would technically work most of the time. > > Any other thoughts? > > David Cook > Systems Librarian > Prosentient Systems > 72/330 Wattle St > Ultimo, NSW 2007 > Australia > > Office: 02 9212 0899 > Online: 02 8005 0595 > > > -- Tomás Cohen Arazi Theke Solutions (http://theke.io) ✆ +54 9351 3513384 GPG: B2F3C15F

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