[Koha-devel] custom core patches management

[dcook at prosentient.com.au]

Hi David,

 

I won’t make a comment on good vs bad strategies, as those are just subjective judgements, and ultimately it really all depends on your context.

 

However, it sounds like you’re making a lot of work for yourself with those files. Using git commands, you could extract equivalents of those .orig, .changed, and .patched files. 

 

Also, by patching prod files like that, you don’t necessarily know exactly what your application state is at any particular time. I suppose you could probably do a git-based manual patching deployment system using git hashes to represent versions, but I’ve found in practice that those cause more headaches than they solve.  

 

Most Koha support providers (like the one I work for) will fork the branch(es) they want to customize, and then generate Debian packages which they distribute around the world as necessary. As soon as you’re running more than 1 Koha server, you really want a way to easily and quickly deploy changes across multiple machines. Koha is large and complex, so I think you’ll find that leveraging the work the community has done to build robust Debian packages is your best bet.

 

Carrying customizations forward through time takes work, so it’s best to upstream everything you can, but I think we all know that’s not always feasible. Again git commands can help you show the changes you’ve made between different versions, and then you can make periodic efforts to review your customizations and port over anything you need to when a new version comes out. 

 

I hope that you find that helpful.

 

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

 

From: Koha-devel <koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org> On Behalf Of David Schmidt
Sent: Tuesday, 2 November 2021 9:01 PM
To: Koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org
Subject: [Koha-devel] custom core patches management

 

Hello koha community,

 

We made some changes to our Koha instance and are now looking for a mechanism to apply them to a new installation.

 

- some of the changes are simply new files, thats easy.

- some changes were possible to put into plugins or use existing hooks.

 

but how do you deal with changes to the koha sourcecode?

 

this is our strategy:

 

1) we have a git repo with our koha source code.

2) if we change code in Foobar.pm we create 3 files.

Foobar.pm.orig

Foobar.pm.changed

Foobar.pm.patch

3) on a new koha instance next we have a script `install.sh` that compares Foobar.pm.orig with the installed file. if they match, the patch is applied.

 

Does that sound like a good idea?

How do YOU manage core changes that do not go upstream?

 

cheers,

david

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