[Koha-devel] Cataloguing authorities 3.6/3.8

[Paul]

We have just discovered a problem with 3.8.4 -- before I can rule out 
whether it is 'our' db or setup that is at fault, or a more general issue, 
I would appreciate some help.

Basically our "authorities" are no longer functional.

EXAMPLE A: TOPIC_TERM "World War" comes up with 414 results ranging from 
'World War 1' to 'World War, 1939-1945 Naval operations, Japanese' all 
"Used 0 times" -- all were previously functional, searchable, mostly from 
Z39.50 imports, and had single|multiple biblios attached.

EXAMPLE B: PERSO_NAME

1) Add a new biblio from Z39.50.  The author is 'Thomas, W. Donald'; we 
have several books by this author; using the default framework, click the 
icon at the end of line 100$a in addbiblio.pl, brings up the pop-up 
'catalogue authority plugin', no sign of this author. 
[authorities/auth_finder.pl?authtypecode=PERSO_NAME&index=tag_100_subfield_a_995647_916674&value_mainstr=Thomas,%20W.%20Donald&value_main=]

2) Search 
authorities/authorities-home.pl?op=do_search&type=intranet&marclist=mainmainentry&operator=contains&value=Thomas%2C+W.+Donald&orderby=HeadingAsc 
--- Authority search results No results found

3) "Search the catalogue" from the home page 
(catalogue/search.pl?q=Thomas%2C+W.+Donald) comes up with 9 results, the 
first 5 are all by this author (the last four, fuzzy, irrelevant.)

4) From any one of the relevant entries, click the author's name: 
catalogue/search.pl?q=au:"Thomas, W. Donald" gives all five proper results

5) checkmarc.pl gives 'Configuration OK, you don't have errors in your MARC 
parameters table'

6) authtypes.pl has the following "Define authority types":
/...
PERSO_NAME Personal Name Personal Names 100
etc, etc

The first 4 biblios were from our 3.6.1 db, which imported without error 
into 3.8.4 ; the fifth is today's Z39.50 import

The cron -z is running every minute, but to verify zebra, I manually did a 
'rebuild_zebra.pl -a -r -v' and a 'rebuild_zebra.pl -b -r -v -x' which went 
through all authorities and biblios without error but one warning:

Records exported: 37716
====================
REINDEXING zebra
====================
14:58:44-24/09 zebraidx(6239) [warn] Unknown register type:
====================
CLEANING
====================

So ... new biblios and items are being recorded, but the cross referencing 
to authorities appears to have died with the upgrade to 3.8.4

Most unfortunately, I can reproduce this in my sandbox and the [now 
updated] production server.  We missed this entirely during our testing - 
mea culpa.

Thoughts anyone?

Many tnx - paul