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

Re: [Koha-devel] ChatGPT and Koha
by David Cook 23 Feb '23

23 Feb '23

I understand what you’re saying because it says its knowledge after 2021 is limited, but it also has a greater breadth of knowledge than your 2 year-ago self. It claimed that some of its Vue.js answers were due to the conventions used by the Vue.js community, which was fascinating. It differed from some examples I found online in Vue.js documentation, so it would be interesting to know if the AI was out of date or if the documentation was out of date. Considering the explanation it gave for its answer, I think the documentation was probably out of date, as it gave a better answer than the documentation. (I found ChatGPT was able to answer my Vue.js questions much better than the official Vue.js documentation and most of the examples I could find online.) I asked it to explain some general best practices for processing background tasks and distributed computing and it gave some excellent answers (and follow-up answers to follow-up questions). It certainly offers a better understanding of those topics than any Koha community developer has. I told it that its not particularly skilled at very specific tasks (like writing a Koha plugin), but it’s very good with fundamentals, and it mentioned that explaining fundamentals is one of its primary goals. It’s not there to write your code for you, but to offer advice/guidance to help you write code better. That said, it’s not always 100% correct either. You do have to consider its answers critically, and sometimes it’s just plain wrong, although usually its wrong in terms of minor details, and if you point out its mistake, it gets the correct answer. I was quizzing it on the use of some Perl POE modules from CPAN and there were times it tried to pass options that just didn’t exist (and have never existed). But its corrections were accurate and followed the concurrent programming designs I used myself years ago with those modules. On the other hand, I had it design a recursive algorithm in PHP for filtering data, and while its first attempts were close, the more I tried to get it to fix it, the worse it got until it was absolutely unusable. Perhaps the problem was the AI or perhaps the problem was with my instructions. I just asked it to do an algorithm for converting ISBN-13 to ISBN-10 in Javascript. I already wrote one myself a few days ago, and it’s interesting to compare. Its algorithm is probably 98% correct, and it wrote it more concisely than I did (although we know I love verbosity). Licensing is certainly a tough topic (consider the licensing problems with GitHub Copilot). According to a post online, it claims not to have a licence on its code, but advises checking with legal professionals to be on the safe side. However, I don’t think a person would really be using the code generated by ChatGPT. The code it generates tends to be example code. The kind of thing you’d find in documentation, tutorials, Stackoverflow, etc. It’s good for illustrating concepts, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to copy/paste it, and just use it. It probably wouldn’t help a person to write “Koha code”, but it could help a person to better understand a concept they need to know while writing “Koha code”. Another example… I just asked “could you generate a functional operating system from scratch?” It said that it could not, but outlined what a person would need to do in order to write one, and gives some good warnings about why it’s probably not a good idea to try to do it solo haha. I know this email is too long, but I suppose I’d just emphasize that it’s a very interesting “helper”. David Cook Senior Software Engineer Prosentient Systems Suite 7.03 6a Glen St Milsons Point NSW 2061 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595 From: Jonathan Druart <jonathan.druart(a)gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, 22 February 2023 7:24 PM To: David Cook <dcook(a)prosentient.com.au> Cc: koha-devel <koha-devel(a)lists.koha-community.org> Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] ChatGPT and Koha For Koha core developers I am not sure it is relevant. Hasn't ChatGPT been fed with 2 years old data? With data we actually wrote ourselves. So basically if I ask it something I am requesting what my 2 year-ago self knew? I have certainly forgotten some stuff, but I also know that what was true 2 years ago is no longer 100% correct. By the way, what would be the license for such generated code? Certainly GPLv3 for Koha, but what about Vue.js code for instance? Le mer. 22 févr. 2023 à 01:53, David Cook <dcook(a)prosentient.com.au <mailto:dcook@prosentient.com.au> > a écrit : Hi all, Like many around the world, I may have been bitten by the ChatGPT bug… Most of my ChatGPT questions have been more general in nature, but I figured I’d ask it about Koha, as there is a lot of public information, but it’s still a niche topic. I asked it to generate me a Koha plugin, and it refused for a while, but eventually I was able to convince it to try. The result wouldn’t even compile, but it got a lot of things right. In other conversations, it’s made mistakes but always done a good job of fixing its mistakes. Has anyone else played with ChatGPT and Koha or ChatGPT in general (on IT topics)? David Cook Senior Software Engineer Prosentient Systems Suite 7.03 6a Glen St Milsons Point NSW 2061 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595 _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel(a)lists.koha-community.org <mailto:Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org> https://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : https://www.koha-community.org/ git : https://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : https://bugs.koha-community.org/

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Volunteer needed to open the bidding for KohaCon24 & need confirmation of task list
by tuxayo 22 Feb '23

22 Feb '23

Hi :) The things to do are: - making the wikipage using the template - make an announcement email using past ones - send reminders - @all: anything else? The aim is to start the bid in the next weeks so proposals that start early 2024 have time to plan. And let the bid run until the next general meeting in april I can help with proofreading and finding past resources. (wikipage template, emails) Cheers, -- tuxayo

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Pull newer images today :-D
by Tomas Cohen Arazi 22 Feb '23

22 Feb '23

Hi, we've just pushed a change to Koha, moving away from node-sass to dart-sass, and older docker images will fail as all assets are automatically built on startup and it will fail otherwise. Best regards -- Tomás Cohen Arazi Theke Solutions (http://theke.io) ✆ +54 9351 3513384 GPG: B2F3C15F

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koha-testing-docker startup gotcha...
by David Cook 22 Feb '23

22 Feb '23

Hi all, With the latest version of koha-testing-docker, you might have problems getting it to start up if your "koha" git directory is not owned by UID 1000. I use koha-testing-docker on Windows, so I use a named volume to mount my "koha" git directory. It also means that I cloned that git repo and do my checkouts with the "root" user in koha-testing-docker (not as my normal user on a Docker host like you would do if you were using Linux as your workstation). So "root" owns my "koha" git directory, which causes koha-testing-docker to fail to startup. I've worked around that by chowning my "koha" git repo to be owned by UID 1000, and that's got it starting up, but it could have future issues where permissions aren't quite right. Anyway, just something to be aware of. David Cook Senior Software Engineer Prosentient Systems Suite 7.03 6a Glen St Milsons Point NSW 2061 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

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ChatGPT and Koha
by David Cook 22 Feb '23

22 Feb '23

Hi all, Like many around the world, I may have been bitten by the ChatGPT bug. Most of my ChatGPT questions have been more general in nature, but I figured I'd ask it about Koha, as there is a lot of public information, but it's still a niche topic. I asked it to generate me a Koha plugin, and it refused for a while, but eventually I was able to convince it to try. The result wouldn't even compile, but it got a lot of things right. In other conversations, it's made mistakes but always done a good job of fixing its mistakes. Has anyone else played with ChatGPT and Koha or ChatGPT in general (on IT topics)? David Cook Senior Software Engineer Prosentient Systems Suite 7.03 6a Glen St Milsons Point NSW 2061 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

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Testing ERM functionality
by David Cook 22 Feb '23

22 Feb '23

Hi Jonathan and folks, Is there a general test plan that can be used for testing ERM functionality? Should/could koha-testing-docker come with some test data for ERM to ease testing? Here's my first look (in a very long time): 1. Go to http://localhost:8081/cgi-bin/koha/admin/preferences.pl?tab=erm 2. Change "ERMModule" to "Enable" 3. Go to http://localhost:8081/cgi-bin/koha/erm/erm.pl I note the following warning in the console: runtime-core.esm-bundler.js:167 [Vue warn]: setup() return property "_is_loading" should not start with "$" or "_" which are reserved prefixes for Vue internals. at <Main> -- In a separate email, I've asked what I should be looking for in terms of QA. Or are we still at a stage of looking for feedback? Personally, I think that we might still be a bit too ERM focused with the Vue.js. Instead of http://localhost:8081/cgi-bin/koha/erm/erm.pl perhaps we should be going to http://localhost:8081/cgi-bin/koha/spa/erm. Note that "spa" is a placeholder here (in this case standing for single page application). Off the top of my head, I don't have a great base URL in mind. That way "Koha" is the Vue.js app, and "ERM" is a component provided to "Koha". We could centralize a number of methods in the root "Koha" app. Actually, me emailing is probably pointless. Maybe one night I can do some work in the evening, so that I can link up with folk and we can chat more. David Cook Senior Software Engineer Prosentient Systems Suite 7.03 6a Glen St Milsons Point NSW 2061 Australia Office: 02 9212 0899 Online: 02 8005 0595

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Vue improvements/refactorings
by Jonathan Druart 22 Feb '23

22 Feb '23

Hi, Pedro and I have been working on improving the way we request the Koha REST API from Vue components. We ended up with the implementation that is available on the following remote branch: https://gitlab.com/joubu/Koha/-/commits/bug_32925 It contains the patches from the following bug reports: *Bug 32898* <https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=32898> - Cypress tests are failing *Bug 32923* <https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=32923> - x-koha-embed must a header of collectionFormat csv *Bug 32806* <https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=32806> - Some Vue files need to be moved for better reusability *Bug 32939* <https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=32939> - Have generic fetch functions in vue modules *Bug 32925* <https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=32925> - Display loading info when a form is submitted First, make the tests pass (32898)! We forgot to include the cypress test in the jenkins pipeline and we missed regressions! There have been regressions on the REST API specs, that are fixed on 32923. We noticed that the code we provided for the ERM module was not flexible enough and too ERM oriented. Some directories have been moved and code split a bit to make it more reusable for other modules (32806). Finally there are 32939 that introduce generic fetch functions, to have all the error handling (catch exceptions and display the error on the UI) in a single place. On top of that we added a "loading" message when a form (POST/PUT/DELETE) is submitted and, thanks to the previous moves, it's only a couple of lines of code! All this must be considered a base for future Vue enhancements, and I would like people interested in the Vue work to have a look at it. Cheers, Jonathan

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Something I learned about MySQL today
by Michael Hafen 21 Feb '23

21 Feb '23

I thought I'd share something I learned this morning about MySQL. The topic is using information in a table in the same query that is inserting that information into the table. Whenever I forget that MySQL doesn't like that it trips me up. I saw it happen recently in a Koha database update, so it was on my mind. Today I found out that it can be done if table aliases are used in the subquery. I was working on an entirely different software when it tripped me up again, but I decided to see if there was a way after all. Here's the query I ended up with, that works in recent versions of MySQL, as an example: insert into users (group_id,handle,name,email,user_notify,password,security_level,landing_page,ldap_username,restricted_leaderboard,search,ticketSelectLimit) (select 33,'user2',u2.name,u2.email,u2.user_notify,u2.password,u2.security_level,u2.landing_page,h2.ldap_username,h2.restricted_leaderboard,h2.search,h2.ticketSelectLimit from users as u2 where handle = 'user' ); -- Michael Hafen Washington County School District Technology Department Systems Analyst

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Login API for Authentication
by Muhammad Uzair 21 Feb '23

21 Feb '23

Dear Developers; I am currently developing a system for my university in which I want to connect users logged in oracle web applications with koha and directly authenticate users to koha from my system portal. For this purpose I want an API to directly send the user id and password to the server of Koha and skip the login screen. I have tried many APIs that were available but none did my work. My requirement is that the user logs in to the oracle portal once and does not need to login to koha again. He gets logged in to koha through api using static userid and password (which are available to me) and lands on the OPAC homepage in which they are already logged in. Kindly provide me with a valid API so that I can do my work easily or any possible solution. Regards

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Compiled files removal from source tree
by Tomas Cohen Arazi 16 Feb '23

16 Feb '23

Hi all, there's been chatter and work about this subject in the last weeks. This is something we postponed until after the 22.11 release, which includes Vue files and forced us to rethink our build pipeline. Today we've done two important things you need to be aware of: * Compiled CSS and JS files of all sorts removed from the tree [1] * misc4dev (hence KTD) will now recomplile things for you when you start KTD or when you run `reset_all` [2] >From now on, you will be able to run `yarn build` and all the things will be built as required. Feel free to inspect the package.json file for more fine-grained commands that have been added. Particularly, you might find the *watch commands useful if you are developing. And there are *prod commands that will be used by the release maintainers and packaging manager. Any enhancements you might want to propose are welcome. Kudos to Jonathan, David Cook, Martin and Mason for the great work they did. [1] https://gitlab.com/joubu/Koha/-/commits/bug_32609 [2] https://gitlab.com/koha-community/koha-misc4dev/-/merge_requests/58 -- Tomás Cohen Arazi Theke Solutions (http://theke.io) ✆ +54 9351 3513384 GPG: B2F3C15F

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