[Koha-devel] Losing biblio.author in 3.8.5

[Paul]

We have a [rather important, it's for donors' tax receipts] report that 
includes:

SELECT
items.barcode AS Barcode,items.dateaccessioned AS 'Acc Date',
biblio.title AS Title, biblio.author AS Author,biblioitems.publishercode AS 
Publisher,biblioitems.publicationyear AS Year,
biblioitems.editionstatement AS Edition,
items.price as FMV, etc etc etc

It worked perfectly from 3.6.1 up to and including 3.8.4

Since we upgraded to 3.8.5 (24 Sep, to fix bug 8520), something has changed 
-- biblio.author systematically comes up empty (all 245$a fields are 
present) while *all* the other field are perfect. (added later: just 
checked some other reports that use biblio.author -- same result, other 
fields are good, author fails.)

I've looked around release notes and bugs without finding anything 
relevant, and am now at a loss as to what I should look for.

Any suggestions warmly accepted.

Thanks and regards,
Paul