[Koha-devel] Koha Developers' Meeting Minutes for June 18 2007

[Joshua M. Ferraro]

ROLL CALL:

ryan, paul, toins, tumer, thd, cm, kyle, jbrice, russel, pecisk, sanspach
notably missing: hdl, chris, slef

NEW MEMBERS, INTRODUCTIONS
Crawford County Federated Library System welcomed to the
dev chat. CCFLS launched their Koha system last month at their
biggest library is running strong and looking forward to 8 more
libraries joining later this year.

Welcomed Pecisk to the community, he's a linux admin and developer and
a big fan of OSS. Looking to start with translating and testing and
move to development long-term

GENERAL DEVELOPER NEWS

Paul reports that 2 libraries are up and running on the soon-to-be
3.0 version of koha; the French team has also launched a new
French bug tracker that will assist with French libraries
reporting bugs; SAN-OP has published a RFP for a new acquisitions
module; one more large public library in New Caledonia has signed
up to switch to Koha in 2007.

A French Non-Profit Organization for Koha has been created,
called KohaLA

Tumer reports a windows installable file for the NEU version of Koha.
http://library.neu.edu.tr/cgi-bbin/koha/opac-downloads
The Parliament library of Turkey plans to install Koha in about a month

GIT DISTRIBUTED VERSION CONTROL + VERSION 3.0 RELEASE PLANS

Kados described LibLime's adoption of Git internally for distributed
version control and proposed moving the Koha code to CVS; developers
decided that it was mainly up to the heavy committers and since all
were in attendence we decided it's a go. LibLime team is responsible
for pulling it off and providing good documentation for what the
new procedures are, etc.

kados described a proposed change to the release theory of the project:
time-based releases. The theory is to do 6 releases a year broken
into three types of releases: alpha,beta,stable.

alpha - maybe some bugs, feature freeze, please test
beta - most bugs fixed, we think it's stable, please test
stable - tested, in production at some places

Q: what if a bug appears in a sept-stable version that is
discovered in, say, november?
A: we release the stable version with the bug fix, so if the
buggy release is 2.2.10, we releas 2.2.10b

Q: how will we handle major new features that could not be
done in just 6 months ?
A:they can be created on a branch and merged when they are
ready.

Q:how will we handle when two teams are working on a similar
feature at the same time?
A: lots of options, probably best to make something complex
like acquisitions a plugin so someone can use whatever
acq module they want.

best to make clear intention of developing a new module
on the koha-devel list; discuss as much as possible with
other interested parties; share the results.

VERSION 2.2 RELEASE PLANS

problem with rel_2_2 branch is that some changes added were
only added to the npl templates. To avoid having a 2.2 and
a 2.4, LibLime agreed to commit all changes made to default
templates too and to make sure everything's working with
both templates.


Goal is to have 2.2.10 working with both templates and based
on rel_2_2.

COPYRIGHT CONVENTIONS

We decided to discuss this further on-list, thd agreed to post
some explainations of why there are some problems with the
existing thread.

OPENCATALOGER

Toins previewed the OpenCataloger project, which is a new
cataloging tool created to work independently from Koha,
but also integrate with it. It's designed with professional
catalogers in mind and has a more standard MARC editor look
and feel.

Well, very productive meeting folks, looking forward to the
next one. Feel free to correct or add to my summary if I
got something wrong or ommitted.

Cheers,

-- 
Joshua Ferraro                       SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS