[Koha-devel] Some questions etc...

[Paul POULAIN]

Rachel Hamilton-Williams a écrit :
> Hi Paul et al,
> 
> Rosalie and the crew have been having a good look at koha 2.2.1 (I think 
> that's it) with a mind to upgrading soon.

good thing, imho.

> There are some things (as expected) which don't work either like they do 
> in her current version, and in some cases "at all".

let me read...

> In particular I want to run some things past you, so that we can decide 
> what to do about them - and to make sure we haven't just missed the 
> point or set it up wrong.
> 
> I'm not sure wether we should be "correcting" the main templates, or 
> just keep on going with our own set? So any thoughts would be appreciated.
> 
> 1/.  "Normal" Acquisitions is not quite "right" or perhaps as clever at 
> it's maths as the version they use now.  You can't correct earlier 
> mistakes in budget allocations (They can do this now when you recieve an 
> item as well as when you order it), and you can't allocate the freight 
> budget over several items to get their true "cost".
> 
> Does anyone other than HLT use normal acquisistions that you know of? 
> Particularly with MARC off I guess?

In fact, I have no library with MARC=OFF. And I don't really test Koha 
with MARC=OFF.

But for normal acquisition, yes I have some libraries (with MARC=ON) 
using it. For calculations problems, I don't know where is your problem, 
I never heard of it before. But maybe it's a bug.

> 2/. You can't edit or manipulate groups - ie from the catalogue, you 
> bring up the item, and you can edit the biblio, and you can edit the 
> item info, but the bits that are in the group record don't seem to be 
> accessable.  We had a whole series of screens for moving items from one 
> group to another and editing the group details which I can't find an 
> equivalent to.  The details are all there, but the MARC fields for them 
> don't come up.  We've got it set to MARC Off I think - but I didn't 
> notice it being different with MARC On

With MARC=ON, you don't have the "group". As I said before, MARC has 
only 2 levels : biblio and item. So this feature is useless when 
MARC=ON. When MARC=OFF, I don't know if it works fine (but i'm 
interested by bugfixes if needed)

> 3/. Authority Files - do these *only* work if you're using UNIMARC?  And 
> is UNIMARC what we'll be using by default?  Should they just work, 
> because I can't for the life of me work out how you get something into 
> an authority file. Instructions on "Authority files for dummies" 
> gratefully accepted :-)

No, they are not limited to UNImarc, but they are limited to MARC=ON.

> 4/. Circulations is a bit "soft" - although you set limits for issues 
> etc, they can be overridden.  Now we could just "harden" koha for HLT - 
> basically in the templates, but what we really want is probably a new 
> "flag" so that regular people on circulations can't override an issue 
> flag. Or it's an option as to wether circulation flags are "strict" or not.

There is no option. But it should be easy to change : all checkings are 
done in the C4/Circ2/canbookbeissued sub.
Every test that fails create an entry in one of $issuingimpossible of 
$needsconfirmation hash.
So, you have 2 possibilities :
* the easiest, but have a local version of this script. Not easy to 
maintain.
* create a systempref "hardencirc", and if it's set, never fill 
$needsconfirmation but $issuingimpossible instead.

> The reports were a bit flakey, but I understand you're working on those 
> Paul?  We'll have to look at wether what Koha thinks we've done, and 
> what we think we've done are the same...

Some nice wizards will be in 2.2.2 (expect a release in 3 days)
-- 
Paul POULAIN
Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres
responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)