[Koha-devel] Ready to Hack

[Nathan Gray]

I've been watching Koha for a little while now, and finally my wife told
me to just install it, because she wants to use it.  As she reads books,
she wants to keep track of which ones she likes, so she can check them
out when our two-year old gets to that reading level.

So now we've got a working Koha system on her computer.  I've noticed
already a few things I'd like to tweak, so I can use it more
comfortably.

I am downloading from CVS right now.  Is there a way to run Koha
directly from the CVS tree?  Any quick start pointers?  I figure I can
leave plain Koha on my wife's machine, and put the CVS version on mine,
both running off her database.

I'm a Perl programmer by trade, with a lot of my time spent re-writing
modules to increase stability, efficiency, and readability (at least, I
understand it better when I'm done).  That's mostly what I'd like to do
here.

First off, I'd like to get Z39.50 searching a little nicer.  Part of
that might just be clearer documentation.  (I'm having problems finding
some ISBN numbers in the Library of Congress, even when they have a LC
call number, so it would be nice to be able to search on that as well,
or know which other servers I should be looking at.)  And so when I
search by title and get lots of records with the same title, it would be
nice to have a few more columns to differentiate between them, like date
published, or LC call number if there is no ISBN.

I would also like to allow the use of Net::SMTP, rather than
Mail::Sendmail, and perhaps the DateTime suite rather than Date::Manip.
I would also like to be able to use DBD::Pg, rather than DBD::mysql, 
though I am not volunteering for that quite yet.

How should I go about getting changes back into CVS?  Is there a contact
person I need to go through?

Thanks for letting me ramble.  

So far, Koha looks really great.  It looks like you've done a good job.

-kolibrie