[Koha-bugs] [Bug 27738] New: Fix fallback for unset DefaultCountryField008 system preference

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

https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=27738

            Bug ID: 27738
           Summary: Fix fallback for unset DefaultCountryField008 system
                    preference
 Change sponsored?: ---
           Product: Koha
           Version: master
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P5 - low
         Component: Cataloging
          Assignee: koha-bugs at lists.koha-community.org
          Reporter: phil at chetcolibrary.org
        QA Contact: testopia at bugs.koha-community.org
                CC: m.de.rooy at rijksmuseum.nl
        Depends on: 13912

Bug 13912 added DefaultCountryField008 to allow defaulting the place of
publication to something other than the previous default of xxu ("somewhere in
the  United States, but I don't know what state"). Trying to follow the Koha
Way of never changing existing behavior, only adding a preference to fix it, it
intended to fall back to xxu, but
https://git.koha-community.org/gitweb/?p=koha.git;a=blob;f=cataloguing/value_builder/marc21_field_008.pl;h=b3c5d0c47f908edaa376b397a3bae5ecf8013c9e;hb=HEAD#l80
thought the preference would be undefined if it wasn't set, and then a QA
followup updated the DB to add it so it's always defined, and the // "xxu" is
unreached and the default value of the pref, '', gets space-padded to three
characters long, '   '.

Since we've now gone 3.3 years with the default having switched from the
unfortunate choice of 'xxu' to the invalid '   ' without anyone filing a bug
about it, I assert that the Koha Way is wrong in this case, that nobody
actually wanted to retain the behavior of defaulting to saying that every book
was published in an unknown US state (or if they did exist, they already fixed
it by using that as their DefaultCountryField008), and we can fix the bug of
defaulting to an invalid value by choosing a new default when
DefaultCountryField008 isn't set, the value "|||" which is "no attempt to code"
which is precisely the case when the cataloger doesn't change it and the system
adminstrator doesn't say it should have a particular value whether or not that
value is correct.


Referenced Bugs:

https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=13912
[Bug 13912] Add syspref for default place of publication (country code) for
field 008, range 15-17
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