September 2002 - Koha-translate - lists.koha-community.org

From the Kaitiaki
by Pat Eyler 27 Sep '02

27 Sep '02

Sep 27, 2002 To the Koha community Welcome, This bi-week's edition of my newsletter is a bit longer than normal. I think this is an accurate reflection of the increased pace of work being done on Koha. We've got new developers working on Koha, new libraries investigating Koha, new projects within Koha, and more public awareness of Koha. I hope that I can do justice to all of the efforts that are going on. As usual, if I managed to miss something, or if I get something wrong, my apologies. Please don't hesitate to contact me at kaitiaki(a)koha.org if you have any questions, concerns, or large piles of money you'd like to give away ;) 1.2 Work is moving along on 1.2.3, with RC14 having been recently released. Steve has also made several improvements to the Koha Demo CD. It is now capable of running a client to demonstrate Koha on a single box. We're still looking for testers and feedback. If you haven't tried the CD yet, please give it a whirl and let us know what you think. It would be nice to be able to clean up any problems, and to develop some solid documentation for it, but we'll need everyones help. 1.4 1.3.0 has been released! This is a major step in the development of the 1.4 series. For the first time, general developers and testers can start making use of the expanded API available with Koha. At this point, there are no user visible changes but new 1.4 centric tools should start appearing in 1.3 releases soon. Please note, the 1.3 series is *not* intended for production use. It is alpha software and should be treated as such. On the other hand, if you have the hardware and time, we'd love to hear about your experiences testing 1.3.0 or any of the 1.3 series releases. Documentation Andrew Aranson is a new contributor and has been working on developer level documentation (called POD). Ewan Tempero is also working on developer level documentation, his efforts have been targeted at developing use cases describing the expected behavior of various programs. As Andrew and Ewan produce more and more information, it will make it significantly easier for new developers to get started with Koha. Nicholas Rosasco has also stepped up the pace on his documentation efforts. He's getting ready to make another release and has asked for final comments from anyone who's read it. (If you're listed in the credits, he's especially interested in hearing about any mistakes or typos.) Translations We've just had a volunteer from South Africa step up to work on Koha. With the recent move toward Open Source Software by the South African government (see http://www.oss.gov.za/ for more details), we hope to see users, translators, and developers coming on-board. The french Koha list is becoming much more active. There are now over thirty users on the list, and email is flying around at an astounding rate. If you're interested in translations, please get involved. The following groups are currently active: French translation fr.koka.org German translation de.koha.org To subscribe to a mailing list for one of these languages, please send email to koha-subscribe@<language site> (koha-subscribe(a)fr.koha.org for example). Bear in mind, discussion on these lists is in the native language of the list, please respect this. We're hoping to get es.koha.org and za.koha.org running soon. General translation discussions should occur (in english) on the koha-translate mailing list hosted at sourceforge. This list also receives documents to be translated (such as this one). If you want to translate a Koha announcement, please contact the author. If you want to translate one of these newsletters, please do. I ask only that you send me a copy of the translation so that I can post it to an appropriate website. Community Last week we got a mention in the Biblio-tech monthly review (see http://www.biblio-tech.com/ for the story). Rosalie Blake (of HLT) presented a talk on OSS and Koha to her local library association. We seem to be cropping up in the press more and more often. If you're at all interested in helping keep us in the public eye (and getting a bit of press for yourself), please contact me to discuss a press release covering your recent decision to adopt Koha or your implementation of Koha. Thanks to those who responded to me about Linux, OSS, or Library conferences. We're coordinating presentations now for at least four appearances. We'd welcome more though, so please feel free to contact me if you're interested. (Even making a presentation to a Linux or Perl users group would help.) There's also been another investment in Koha development. An anonymous patron has stepped forward to sponsor a core developer's work on extending Koha. With more organizations catching the vision of Koha as a cooperative effort, I think we'll be seeing more of this happen in the days to come. 120 day review Well, I've been serving as the Kaitiaki for about 120 days now, so I thought I might do a quick self evaluation and comparison against my stated goals. When I initially talked about taking on the role, I laid out goals in three areas; Code Cleanliness, Feature Inclusion, and Koha Uptake. I'll address each of these separately. Code Cleanliness: I had (and still have) a vision of a code base that's easy to read, easy to modify, and easy to verify. There have been a couple of improvements in this area, but most of them have occurred in spite of my inaction. I'm encouraged to see efforts at writing tests and programmer documentation, and plan on encouraging this effort as we move forward. Feature Inclusion: Koha has certainly seen a number of new additions; the installer, the upgrade script, templating, etc. I hope that the RFPs from Nelsonville will spur both more development and greater sponsorship from other libraries. With the recent start of the 1.3 release series, I think we'll be seeing a lot more changes soon. Koha Uptake: I think this has been the place where I've really come through on my vision. I had wanted to put Koha in front of a lot of eye balls. With stories in a variety of press outlets, press releases, and planned presence at several conferences in the next six months, I think that we've really begun to establish ourselves as a valid option in the eyes of libraries. Overall, I think I've been successful in my role thus far. I'm honored to have the opportunity to work with so many talented and wonderful people. I'd like to especially thank Chris Cormack (the 1.2 Release Manager), Paul Poulain (the 1.4 Release Manager), and Nicolas Rosasco (the Marketing & Recruiting Manager) -- without their efforts the last 120 days would not have gone nearly as well. I hope that you're as excited about our progress as I am. I really do think that we're looking at a really bright future. happy hacking, Pat Eyler Kaitiaki/manager the Koha project

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Koha 1.3.0 released
by Pat Eyler 25 Sep '02

25 Sep '02

Koha 1.3.0 has been released. This release marks the beginning of public development and testing of the MARC compliant Koha we've been Looking forward to. As the 1.3 releases stabilize and reach feature completion, they will become Koha 1.4. This is an alpha quality release only. *DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE IT IN PRODUCTION SYSTEMS* It may cause data corruption or loss, it may confuse patrons, it may cause books to refile themselves in strange places. *IT SHOULD BE USED FOR TESTING ONLY*. (I hope that's clear enough.) If you are want to use Koha in a production setting, please stick with the stable 1.2 release until the 1.3 series stabilizes enough for us to create Koha 1.4.0. Significant new features in this release include: * Data is stored natively in a MARC based format. * Multiple flavors of MARC are supported. * Enhanced API supports both the new MARC format and the older Koha specific format. Please note though, that from a users perspective, this release should look just like a 1.2 series release. All of the work so far has been in redesigning the data format and extending the API. User visible changes will be included once the infrastructure has stabilized. It is also important to note that the simple acquisition system is currently broken. *DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT USING IT* The full acquisition system works correctly. Paul Poulain Pat Eyler 1.4 Release manager Kaitiaki/manager the Koha project the Koha project ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/koha-devel

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From The Kaitiaki
by Pat Eyler 13 Sep '02

13 Sep '02

Sep 13, 2002 To the Koha community Welcome, Koha seems to be showing up in a lot more places these days. I've heard from people in the US, Ireland, Germany, India, and Panama about their desire to start using it. We've recently shown up on the South African Government's Open Source Software website. I've even seen a Koha installation in Japan. This is really cool! What's even better is that we're poised to do even more. If you've got a question, comment, or a success story, please feel free to drop me a line. 1.2 More work has gone into 1.2.3, and RC13 has just been released. We're seeing a lot of testing help from the community, and this will be key to making 1.2.3 work extremely well for everybody. 1.4 We're getting closer to a 1.3.0 release. Paul Poulain, the 1.4 release manager expects it in the next 2 weeks. What makes this 1.3/1.4 release so special? Well, on the surface, nothing seems to change... Koha should work exactly as in the 1.2 versions, but the underlying database API has been completely rewritten. Data is stored in the old, custom format and in MARC format too (MARC21 English by default, but other flavours of MARC will be supported as well. The 1.3.0 release has to be heavily tested to ensure that everything works as it did under 1.2.X. The next steps in the 1.3 series include MARC tools for librarians, MARC export and import, and many other nice features. REMEMBER : the 1.3.0 IS alpha-software Use it only for TESTING PURPOSES. You've been warned ! Documentation If you've converted from a proprietary ILS to Koha, please contact <nsr_koha(a)hotmail.com>. He's working on a migration guide to add to our existing manual. Translations Work is currently being done on some of our documentation translation tools. We're hoping to have tools and documentation ready for translators soon. Community Philanthropy Australia is this weeks news maker, see <http://www.linuxpr.com/releases/5107.html >. We've also made it onto a few more radar screens, systems from Follet.com and Epixtech.com have both been spotted checking out Koha. In breaking news, Steve Tonnesen has worked a bit more Koha magic. This week he's released a demo CD for Koha. This CD will allow a user to run a sample Koha installation on any Win32 systems that will boot from a CD. What a great way to spread the word. An ISO image (suitable for burning CDs) is available at: <http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=16466>. Koha has been invited to participate in the Think-Linux show in Columbus, Ohio (in the US). We're not sure yet whether this is logisticly possible for us. If you're interested in making our appearance at this show a reality, or in seeing Koha at a local conference, User Group meeting, or similar event, please let me know. While the pace of Koha acceptance and development seem to be picking up, we're still a very friendly place for newcomers. If you're new to Koha, please stop by the mailing list and introduce yourself. happy hacking, Pat Eyler Kaitiaki/manager the Koha project

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