[Koha-devel] zebra installation, was: New Installer in master git tree

[MJ Ray]

Paul POULAIN <paul.poulain at free.fr> wrote:
> MJ Ray a écrit :
> > The installer does not yet configure zebra.  See the KNOWN BUGS bit of
> > my announcement.  That is the next-but-one thing on my TODO.
>
> I think that the install setup should be :
> - install Koha, apache part
> - run webinstaller for librarian questions
> - at the end of the webinstaller, ask "are you a large library, that 
> will run zebra, or a small one that will run Koha 3.0 without zebra" 
> (explain what it means exactly here)

Here's where I'm confused: I thought that Zebra was the best thing
since sliced bread and anyone who has enough server permissions to use
it should be using it, because Koha-Z is faster than Koha-NZ on the
same server.  Is it?

> If the user choose "NoZebra" => set the systempref accordingly
> If the user choose "Zebra"   => just say "ok guy, you'll have to ask 
> your sysadm to install zebra, say him to look at wiki.koha.org/blabla 
> Note that you won't be able to search in your catalogue until he has 
> done the stuff. Other functions are running immediatly"
> Then the sysadm runs what is needed to run zebra.
> I can't imagine even a second that setting zebra can be done through a 
> script.

While some koha sysadmins will probably want to tweak Zebra, can't we
ship a generally-useful default?  What's the complication?

> rebuild_zebra.pl will do most of the stuff, but the library will have to 
> set zebra as a service, and that's different on every system (Linux, 
> Unix, Mac OSX, Windows)

What does this do (misc/migration_tools/rebuild_zebra.pl has no
perldoc) and should we call it from some CGI (the web installer?) if
required?

I'll add a note to README.txt about the zebra service.

"Joshua M. Ferraro" <jmf at liblime.com> wrote:
> Most of Zebra's configuration can now be set up using a set of standard
> conventions, I don't think we should just relegate that setup to the
> local sysadmin, it's too complicated a process. We need to provide them
> with some sound defaults IMO. For instance, I think official Koha 3.0
> should have both global and database-specific configuration files, probably
> the following:
>
> global:
> default.idx
> explain.att
> gils.att
> numeric.chr
> tagsetm.tag
> word-phrase-utf.chr
> explain.abs
> explain.tag
> kohalis
> sort-string-utf.chr
> usmarc.mar
>
> database-specific:
> bib1.att
> record.abs

I think have added all of these and some more from zoom_basic to
koha.git - I'll post patches shortly.  Please fix as needed.  I also
see usmarc.mar there - what about other MARC flavours?

> Of these, the only one that MUST be configured for each system is
> kohalis, that stores the Zebra authentication info.

I also need to update koha-conf.xml and the zebra-*.cfg files with
system configuration details.  Anything else?

Thanks,
-- 
MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 -
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