[Koha-bugs] [Bug 11193] Update Queryparser conf file to take into account changes made by bug 8252

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.koha-community.org]

http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=11193

--- Comment #12 from David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au> ---
(In reply to mathieu saby from comment #11)
> Well, searching is a pretty important feature in a ILS ;-) So I hope
> somebody will take care of that. Even if there is no formal maintainer, at
> least writing up-to-date documentation about how it works and how
> configuring it would be great...
> 
> I'm experiencing difficulties with my VM, but I will try to fix this patch
> today.
> 
> Mathieu

Yes, searching is an important feature in an ILS.

If you're having issues with the QueryParser, I would recommend turning it off
or paying someone to fix it/improve it.

Yes, up-to-date documentation would be great, but that's not going to appear
out of the void. Someone has to put their time and energy into doing it.
Personally, I think the great thing about open source is that anyone can
contribute. If something isn't working, a person can examine the code, work it
out, patch it, and hopefully share their work with others.

I think where things fall apart a bit is when people expect others to do
everything for them for nothing. It's great when someone with knowledge, skill,
and expertise shares their work or invests their time and energy into a
project, but it's really their choice.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that there's no such thing as a free lunch.
That is to say, even when we're receiving something for free, it's the product
of human labour. In my case, I'm paid to work on Koha 8 hours a day 5 days a
week. In the course of that work, I'll upstream bug fixes, enhancements, and
features. That is, I'll contribute to Koha for free, but it's coming at
someone's expense. Now, there are a lot of great people who volunteer on Koha
on their own time, and I think that should be applauded. Those are people are
the best. But even then... they're going to work on what they want to work on
most likely. 

It seems clear to me that the QueryParser is not a critical issue at the
moment. If it were, someone would be paying a company to work on it, or they
would be volunteering their free time to work on it. Neither is happening at
the moment.

Now, I'm actually pretty interested in the QueryParser. The current way Koha
build queries is very suboptimal. However, it's not so obviously suboptimal
that anyone is willing to pay anyone to fix it. So query parsing/building is in
a state of limbo. I think about steering clients in the direction of fixing
query parsing and building, but I have other projects on at the moment.
Likewise, I am not willing to sacrifice my non-work time to work on Koha
anymore.

In fact, of the two or three people I can think of who have worked on the
QueryParser, I think none of them volunteer their free time on Koha at the
moment.

So I return to the options of turning it off, paying someone to fix it/improve
it, or learning how to do it yourself. I was curious about it, so I taught
myself about it. Again, that's the glory of open source.

Even in the case of documentation, it takes resources to build and maintain
documentation. 

If you're interested in bringing the documentation about the QueryParser
up-to-date, I would suggest creating a wiki page, and start building up the
documentation. It can be improved over time. Next time I'm working with/on it,
maybe I'll take a look.

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