[Koha-devel] Cataloguing authorities 3.6/3.8

[Paul]

Mark,

I truly appreciate you reply. I don't top post, so plz see below

At 12:42 AM 9/27/2012 +0800, Mark Tompsett wrote:
>Greetings,
>
>>Anyway, I'm about to start a complete new install (o/s + 3.8.4) on the
>>sandbox to test how I can "fix" the production server
>
>This would be a great opportunity to do a packages or git installation.
>You only have to get the data from the live machine:
>$  mysqldump -u {the user name} -p {the koha database name} > PleaseTryIt.sql

I back up every day at 3.00am, and can do a "specific" without problem.

>And transfer the data into the instance database, or git database before 
>doing the web install.
>A git install is similar to a tarball install (you still get to name your 
>database whatever you'd like, and still have those nasty long building 
>sequences), and if you search bugzilla for patches, you can see if your 
>problem has already been fixed with a patch that someone else provided.

Maybe our library is unique?  We like to have functional IT, never touch it 
(security concerns excepted), and review every couple of years. We started 
Koha in 2011 (3.4.x?) and settled with 3.6.1 as soon as it came out. We had 
a fully functional, adapted to our requirements, system. I made the 
decision to "upgrade" to 3.8.[4 at the time] because we were in our two 
year cycle to upgrade four servers and 29 workstations from Ubuntu 10.04 
LTS to 12.04 LTS.

I am now under serious pressure from our Board for my "incompetence" in 
breaking a system that met our charity's needs.

While I am *personally* fully prepared to try and be part of a community 
developing a great system, this cannot spill over into my $dayjob keeping a 
charity's databases of more than 650,000 items "up and running."

I am currently PO'd at myself for not doing enough QA -- and this denotes 
no disrespect for all the people involved with QA within the Koha 
community, although I have to admit I was a bit surprised by someone 
mentioning that all versions of 3.8 have this glitch concerning indexing 
authorities. We use open licence/GPL Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Apache, Sendmail, 
Mysql, perl, php, various java, etc, and while they all have their ups and 
downs I don't remember a "sort of step backwards" like this.

>If it is, then you can apply the patch on the live system (after testing 
>on your sandbox) -- without you having to figure out how to do it yourself.

Sorry -- I'm responsible and need to "figure out how to do it."  Not 
necessarily down the last detail, but at least enough to feel comfortable 
and responsible with what I'm doing. I'm not fully up to date with all 
coding today, but after more than half a century involvement in IT I can 
certainly "understand it" even if I can't "write it."

>BTW, more problems were fixed in 3.8.5, and a packages installation on 
>your sandbox would be good practice for doing an upgrade from tarball to 
>packages in live. Upgrades become so much easier, and the down time is 
>mostly reindexing.

Again, sorry, but I'm not looking for practice. I'm under severe pressure 
to *fix* Koha. My boss doesn't understand "sandboxes" -- she listens to 
cataloguers' complaints, hears that our coordination with other 
institutions is broken, and yells at me.

>Just trying to suggest something to save you headaches in the future, like 
>the one you are having now because you said you wanted the headaches and 
>didn't want to try the suggestion before.

Mark - I truly appreciate and understand your pov.  Over the last 18 months 
Koha has been good to us, and I would like this to continue. I developed a 
number of "customizations", a few purely cosmetic, but mostly rewriting 
control number and barcode perl scripts to coordinate with half a million 
other "items" that we hold in other databases, and to coordinate our 
"authorities" (and biblios) with other Canadian national institutions ... 
it *was* working before 3.8 ... and all I need to do is get back on track.

If I have to back track to 3.6.1, I don't know how to convert 3.8 
biblio/items back to 3.6 and I'll "be responsible" for telling the 
cataloguers to redo [currently] about 600 entries, increasing by about 80 
every day.  I'm getting a tad desperate to avoid this.

Thanks for your help, time and consideration.

Best regards
Paul