Greg, Welcome, welcome, welcome! Always glad to have another private citizen take up the call and choose to become part of the development community for Koha. It sounds like you're already well on your way, so I'll refrain from offering any advice or recommendations. Your plan to tackle low-hanging fruit sounds very good to me, and I look forward to seeing your patches. As I'm sure you're aware, Koha has just entered the "feature freeze" portion of the 3.6 development cycle, so any patches you submit that introduce new features will be held until after the Oct. 22nd release of Koha 3.6. So, if your submitted feature seems "stuck" for a while, that's why. Bug fixes are, of course, fair game, and greatly appreciated. If you'd like some Git practice, you can always test submitted patches and send them back with your sign-off. A list of patches that need a signoff can be found here: http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&field0-0-0=cf_patch_status&query_format=advanced&type0-0-0=equals&value0-0-0=Needs%20Signoff&title=Bug%20List:%20Needs%20Signoff. Cheers, -Ian (sekjal in IRC) On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 9:33 PM, Greg Barniskis <gbarniskis@gmail.com>wrote:
Hello all,
Some of you may recognize my name from the context of my long-time employment at a leading Wisconsin public library system. My employer has a contract with LibLime to develop LibLime Koha in ways specific to their business needs as a very large public library consortium. That's not really central to my job description there; I am a technology integrator, a generalist for a pretty wide and deep tech stack that happens to include LibLime Koha. I mainly get to watch, and sometimes assist in integrating the outcomes of that contractual development process.
I only bring up that subject so that I may acknowledge it as loosely relevant in an environmental way (I know some of what I know because of where I work), but then to really emphasize how little my employer or its vendor relationship has to do with my reasons for writing this today, or for that matter anything else that I may write in the future. Just to be clear, when I'm writing things or contributing code from my personal gmail address, I'm doing it on my own time, on my own equipment, for my own reasons in my own context as an informed private citizen.
Anyway, I have decided that, all forkiness aside, I would like to contribute code and other content to the Koha community via the community's selected tools for bugs, wiki, git, etc. To that end I have registered for accounts on k-c bugs and wiki, and have for a long time now been subscribed to the devel and patches email lists (I sometimes even grok what passes on them =).
I've been using Perl as an all-purpose utility glue for quite a few years, doing mostly smallish scripts for unix and windows systems management. My most celebrated Perl achievement: low-jacking my employer's old Sun server print spool in order to digitally shred its venerable but verbose Dynix Classic ILS greenbar paper reports directly into Excel spreadsheets on no paper. The customers seemed to really like that trick.
In more recent years, I've also been using Perl a lot with HTML::Template and with DBI for lots of different Access, MySQL and Postgres contexts, all on relatively small scales. I don't really know any Template::Toolkit yet, but I have the ora book for it and expect the transition won't be too traumatic. I'm new to Git, but have read enough of the relevant Koha wiki pages to think that I have now correctly checked out the current development HEAD to play with, formatted my first patch file, and eventually even got that first patch emailed to the patches list (I think).
I expect I'll be limiting my contributions to low hanging fruit in the short term, until I get a bit more comfortable with Git and Koha internals. For now, I just wanted to say hi, and that I plan to begin submitting small bug fixes soon and various enhancements someday, and that I'm doing so from a context strictly unrelated to my employment.
Thanks to those who helped me get started on irc today (and to those who will undoubtedly have to clean up my Git newbie mistakes tomorrow =). _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha-community.org http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/
-- Ian Walls Lead Development Specialist ByWater Solutions Phone # (888) 900-8944 http://bywatersolutions.com ian.walls@bywatersolutions.com Twitter: @sekjal