[Koha-devel] Serving Intranet from a subpath

[dcook at prosentient.com.au]

When I say it's a lot of work, I mean more so in terms of testing and QA than the writing/authoring of the patch. 

If you did a huge patch with a bunch of link changes via regex, no one would probably test it, because it would be too hard to thoroughly test. (And then it would be difficult for you to keep rebasing to keep up with Koha as it changed.)

If I were you... I'd probably do a patch for the core uri_for() mechanism, and then propose adding a Coding Guideline that requires using it instead of hard-coded links like "/cgi-bin/koha/..." going forward. And then once that is part of Koha, then I'd open up targeted reports that look at updating the templates for say a particular module (e.g. Circulation, Cataloguing, Reports, etc) and go one by one. You could also try to recruit people to your cause for testing and QA. While I don't have a particular need for serving Koha via a subpath, I do find it interesting, so I'd be willing to do some testing/QA. I don't know that I have stamina to do the entire staff interface though... as that's over 400 templates.

Another thought would be to first target the OPAC, since it has far fewer templates to update. Once it's been proven in the OPAC, it might be easier to convince people for the staff interface too, and maybe QA/RM would be willing to make changes with less rigorous testing, since it was already a proven change. 

As for bringing it to the attention of the RM, I've been around the Koha community for 10.5 years, and I still don't have an answer for that one 😉. You're in a good time zone, so if I were you I'd try bringing it up at a Koha developer meeting on IRC. I think there's one in the next day or so: https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Development_IRC_meeting_17_August_2022

Anyway, don't take anything I say as too authoritative. It's just my 2 cents (ie opinion) as someone who has been around a while. 

I don't think that anyone can really guarantee that a change will be accepted, and I know that can make some developments (especially architectural ones) really hard to get off the ground. 

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

Office: 02 9212 0899
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-----Original Message-----
From: Koha-devel <koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org> On Behalf Of Thomas Klausner
Sent: Monday, 15 August 2022 9:57 PM
To: koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org
Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] Serving Intranet from a subpath

Hi!

On Mon, Aug 15, 2022 at 10:02:18AM +1000, dcook at prosentient.com.au wrote:
> I feel like we've had this conversation before but now I can't find a record of it...

Yes, we had the same problem with OPAC, and "solved" it there with a HTML-Rewriting middleware (not very stable, but good enough for now)

> I was intrigued by that "base" suggestion, but there's a few issues with it:

`base` is indeed very tricky had can have weird corner cases. But if it would have been an easy fix, I'd go with it. But as `base` is not working for our uses cases (without having to touch all links/templates) I think it's not the best option.

> Personally, I'm in favour of using "uri_for()" template methods, which 
> are common in pretty much every web framework around today, but it 
> would probably be a prohibitive amount of work.

A lot work, yes (though I guess that 99% can be done with a few regex, but the hard part will be finding the corner cases that did not work). 
But the Steiermärkische Landesbibliothek is willing to do that work.

> I also wonder how it
> might affect some of the latest Vue.js work that Jonathan has been 
> doing.

I don't know a lot about how that app is implemented, but usually the Vue.js app will have its own internal routing and will "only" need to know two things:
* where is the API the app should be talking to?
* where are the vue.js source files and other assets located

I also did not take a look how the Mojo API is connected with the rest and if / which paths need to be adapted there (though as Mojo provides `uri_for` I assume it will be simple)

> I'd love to get rid of "/cgi-bin/koha" one day in any case, since it's a holdover from decades past...

Yes, if we generate links via a function, we could easily get rid of `/cgi-bin/koha` in the same go :-)

> Ultimately, I think only the RM can answer this one. 

And how can I get the RM to think about this issue, so we might get an answer (sorry, I'm still not that integrated into the Koha community..)

Greetings,
domm

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl                             https://domm.plix.at
for(ref bless{},just'another'perl'hacker){s-:+-$"-g&&print$_.$/}
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