[Koha-devel] My dev list for 22.05

[Jonathan Druart]

Hello everybody,

I have been listing some tasks I would like to work on during the next
development cycle.
I suggest a give and take approach. Help me on one or more of those
topics and I will help you as I can on whichever topic(s) you decide.

1. Add more sample data to misc4dev
It can be sometimes painful to recreate some situations when using the
data provided by misc4dev. I would like to extend the data set to make
some patches easier to test out of the box.
We could, for instance, have:
 - big records
 - records with many items
 - records and items with cover images
 - more acquisition data
 - etc?

Just tell me what kind of data you miss on a regular basis and I will
try to add them to misc4dev. If you have such records/data, send them
to me for inclusion!

2. Remove item-level_itype
We have been discussing this one for a long time already, is it the
time to tackle it down?
See
 - https://lists.koha-community.org/pipermail/koha-devel/2015-December/042114.html
 - Bug 10385 - item-level_itypes checks need to be refactored
 - Bug 29106 - Can we get rid of Koha::Item->effective_itemtype

The work would consist in providing a plan to go ahead then provide a patch.

3. Merge biblio and biblioitem
Self-explanatory, merge the 2 tables to remove the unneeded 1-1
relation between them

4. Improve action logs
We have had several changes and reports in this area lately. We could
improve the way we log changes for easy tracking and comparaison.
See
 - Bug 28714 - Bib record change tracking action log
 - Bug 29451 - Merging records and authorities - log details for the
delete action so it could be recreated
 - Bug 28692 - Reduce DB action_log table size

I think we should add 2 new columns to log before and after the object
is updated, serialized in JSON. We could then generate the diff on
display.

5. Patron searches (holds and checkouts)
Those two patron searches do not use the same code as the other patron searches.
We should uniformize them.
 - Bug 29136 - Patron search on request.pl has performance and display issues
 - comment 37 of Bug 15812 - Checkout search with too many results
(single character search) causes poor performance or timeout
There is also bug 29125 (Use Koha::Patron object in
C4:Utils::DataTables::Members.pm) that is removing the SQL query to
use Koha::Patrons.

5. Async ES indexation
Now that we have the task queue we should use it to index the records
and don't index them in a synchronous way.
Bug 27344 - Implement Elastic's update_index_background using
Koha::BackgroundJob
If we don't want to use the task queue for that purpose we should
provide another solution.
To be discussed and implemented (or validate and test the patches that
are already on bug 27344)

6. mailman2discourse
It seems that people are willing to move from our historical mailing
list to something more modern like discourse.
I would like to get back to this job, who is willing to help me?

7. Split and shrink git repo
I've already done several iterations in this area and I would like to
get back to it. However I need someone with good git knowledge to
continue and focus on this.

8. Move C4 and Koha to lib
We discussed that earlier and I even attached patches to bug 28589. I
don't think it's top priority but I can dedicate some hours if some of
you think it is a move we must do now.

9. Improve our strings for translators
See
 - Bug 29602 - We must be nicer with translators
 - Bug 20988 - [OMNIBUS] Internationalization: wrap all translatable
text inside t() calls
I had to spend some time in the PO when I was releasing 21.11, and
really we are not nice with translators. The %s everywhere make things
very hard to maintain, read and translate.
We should help them, and even if a big move is needed it will be a win
in the long term, for us (developers) and for them.

There are some other topics I have in mind, but those ones need to be
done in small teams as they are quite big.

Let me know what you think and if you are willing to give me a hand!

And also, what's on your list for 22.05?

Cheers,
Jonathan