Erratum: Next major release will be in May, not March :) On Wed, 8 Feb 2017 at 11:39 Jonathan Druart < jonathan.druart@bugs.koha-community.org> wrote:
Hello librarians and developers,
Several interesting initiatives emerged in this beginning of year 2017. Lot of things need to ready for the next stable release in March. If you have some spare time, do not hesitate to get involve and make things you love moving forward :)
= Catalyst academy = Let's start with the yearly Catalyst academy week. The Open Source Academy is a Catalyst initiative designed to provide training & work experience in open source development for young New Zealand technologists. We got signoffs and patches from 6 students (Zoe, Luke, Grace, Karen, Caitlin and Emma) and they all got at least 1 patch pushed into master this week [1]. Congrats to all of them! Looking forward the next one :)
= Move marcxml out of the biblioitems table (bug 17196) = Well, that's it, it's in and will be in 17.05! I'd like to specially thanks Mason, Josef, Zeno, Nick and Marcel to have been involved in the testing and QA process of this important change. It will offer us more flexibility in the future for new developments as well as bring us performance boost in few areas.
Since that change will break lot of reports, I have worked on a way to automatically detect the problematic reports and automagically convert it using the new columns. I think we really need it for the next major release, take a look at bug 17898 (Add a way to automatically convert SQL reports).
= Dashboard = I have submitted a pull request which has been quickly merged (thanks Chris!). The dashboard (http://dashboard.koha-community.org) now displays a "Overall bug tracker health status" with the number of blocker, critical and major bug reports opened over the last 60 days. If you want to quickly know which are the hot patches waiting for you, just click on the link and you will get the bug list.
=Bootstrap 3= The bootstrap library used for the staff interface has been upgraded to the version 3.3.7. Lot of work has been done by Josef and Owen to make the staff interface looking awesome. Elements like buttons, links, icons, modal windows have been homogenised. Some work are still in progress but the big step has been done. You can take a look at the depend patches of bug 17873 (Make all buttons Bootstrap styled) if you want easy signoffs.
= Hea - Share your statistics with the community = Few days ago I have submitted patches for a proposition of what could be Hea version 2. If you want more informations, take a look at bug 18066 and especially the comment 2 about screenshots. Developers are very welcome to test, and librarians to give their opinion on what could be missing to make Hea better. I would also like to get help from a native English speaker to add more informations on the administration page to explain better what happens (and what will not happen!) when an option or another is set.
= Refactoring = Lot of refactoring bug reports are waiting for testers and QAers. Everything has been stuck for the last month. I really would like to see more attention on these bugs, to continue the work in progress. To know how you can help, take a look at this graph: https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/showdependencygraph.cgi?id=15449 Zoom out, zoom out, once again. If you are a signoffer, pick the orange boxes, if you are a QAer, look at the yellow ones.
= Template Toolkit syntax for notices = This is certainly one of the most important area if you want to help us getting this in for the next release. These are quite lot of things to do to get something ready. First we want to make sure we will not get regression using the TT syntax. To prove that, I have opened an omnibus (see bug 17961 and related bugs - TT syntax for notices - Prove we have an equivalent for our historical custom syntax). A huge amount of tests are provided to prepare the ground and safe our backs for later. It is, in my opinion, the important part of the work. All of these patches are easy to test. To ease the migration for libraries, I have developed an interface to automagically convert the notices from the historical syntax to the TT syntax. You can take a look at bug 17981 and bug 18007 for this interface change. To test *all* of this stack change, you just need to checkout the remote branch from my github repository [2] Screenshot of the convert interface: https://pageshot.net/pVRqSxln4A9cqjtM/pro.kohadev.vm
= Authority merge bugs = Marcel is reworking the authority merge feature. It is quite buggy and the code is hard to maintain currently. You can take a look at bug 17908 (Authority merge omnibus) and all related bug reports to help and/or follow the progress.
The next general IRC meeting is on March 1st, 20 UTC. https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/General_IRC_meeting_1_March_2017
The next dev IRC meeting is today (!) at 20 UTC
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Development_IRC_meeting_8_February_2017
Hope to see your there!
Cheers, Jonathan
[1] https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Catalyst_Academy [2] https://github.com/joubu/Koha/tree/bug_17981