[Koha-devel] Country-specific forks?

[Philippe Blouin]

Just so I do not sound like a Norwegian-hater (which would be very hard, 
I can't imagine anyone hating Norwegians! ), I want to specify that my 
comment was not suggesting a specific fork.  That would be messy.

I would have thought this feature could have been generalized enough to 
be named something else than "Norvegian", and if something needed to be 
hardcoded, it could be a patch easily downloadable, maintained by the 
Norwegian community.  (Not sure what that implies, so please use salt...:) )

But then again, I don't mind the name as much as the fact that it 
brought a lot with it, filled my logs, forced me to update my servers 
and realise that it must be "compiling" (and failing) every single time 
i get on those pages, thus impacting performance... Then writing an 
email and sounding like Norwegians are the worst :-)

I hope to visit Norway one day...


Philippe Blouin,
Responsable du développement informatique

Tél.  : (888) 604-2627
philippe.blouin at inLibro.com <mailto:philippe.blouin at inLibro.com>

inLibro | pour esprit libre | www.inLibro.com <http://www.inLibro.com>
On 02/11/2016 04:38 AM, Magnus Enger wrote:
> Dear Community!
>
> A quote from another thread on koha-devel:
>
> "I look at the code, and beside wondering why that custom feature
> [Norwegian patron DB] is so profoundly imbricated into master Koha, I
> was wondering what is not working."
>
> I think this raises an interesting question. Should we let features
> into Koha that are only of interest to libraries in one or a small
> number of countries? Or should we confine those features to
> country-specific forks?
>
> The quote above implies (I think) that support for the Norwegian
> patron DB should be in a country-specific fork.
>
> On the other hand, the project implementing Koha for public libraries
> in Turkey has been criticized for not integrating their customizations
> into Koha. To which someone replied that the customizations were not
> of much interest to libraries outside Turkey.
>
> So do we want one Koha to rule them all, including country-specific
> features, or do we want one fork per country?
>
> Personally, I prefer the former. In the case of the Norwegian patron
> DB, that is one of the 2-3 "must have" features that all Norwegian
> public libraries will be looking for when they are choosing between
> Koha or some proprietary system. Should we be telling them "Nope, you
> can't use the real Koha, but you can use this fork over here"? That
> will not increase their confidence in choosing Koha, I suspect.
>
> That said, I do think some principles should be applied:
>
> - Strive to make even the country specific features as general as
> possible, so that others can use them as starting points for similar
> features.
>
> - Strive to make the features as unobtrusive as possible.
>
> And maybe, in time, the plugin system can be made powerful enough that
> it can handle some or all of the country-specific features?
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Best regards,
> Magnus Enger
> Libriotech
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