[Koha-devel] My dev list for 22.05

Thu Dec 2 01:39:59 CET 2021

Hey Jonathan,

Thanks for reaching out.

We recently did a phpBB to Discourse move that's been live about a week now, so I'm happy to share my recent knowledge and experience for the "mailman2discourse" task. 

Other than that, I'm not sure how much help I have to give. I have a small interest in "Move C4 and Koha to lib", also small interest in "Improve action logs" since I use them quite a bit (although usually from the koha-mysql CLI rather than the web UI). 

--

As for my work... I haven't compiled a real list yet but...
- Improving authentication generally (especially modularity via 24539, maybe 28507) (will hopefully be sponsored)
- holds enhancements 15565 and 15516 (will hopefully be sponsored)
- Replacing CGI scripts with Mojolicious controllers (28325, 26791) (I doubt anyone would sponsor this, especially as core module like C4/Auth.pm and C4/Template.pm need refactoring to make this work 100% correctly, so very very unlikely to happen, which is a bit unfortunate.)

I also have a use case where I want to send Koha biblio data elsewhere on create/update/delete, but Koha plugins won't be suitable. I've been thinking that it would be good to publish a message to a RabbitMQ topic on biblio create/update/delete. In fact, that could potentially replace the existing C4::Biblio::_after_biblio_action_hooks and Koha::Item::_after_item_action_hooks functions, and then the background_jobs_worker.pl or some other work could invoke the plugins.

Currently, I'm planning to modify the C4::Biblio::_after_biblio_action_hooks and Koha::Item::_after_item_action_hooks functions to push those create/update/delete messages to RabbitMQ. I probably won't use the Koha::BackgroundJob system, since I want the integration to be loosely coupled - the custom worker will just listen to the RabbitMQ topic and that's all Koha core will have to know about it. 

That's probably all for now heh.

David Cook
Senior Software Engineer
Prosentient Systems
Suite 7.03
6a Glen St
Milsons Point NSW 2061
Australia

Office: 02 9212 0899
Online: 02 8005 0595

-----Original Message-----
From: Koha-devel <koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org> On Behalf Of Jonathan Druart
Sent: Wednesday, 1 December 2021 10:56 PM
To: koha-devel <koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org>
Subject: [Koha-devel] My dev list for 22.05

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
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