The Koha Community is pleased to announce the release team for Koha version 3.14. The team includes volunteers from nine countries, and represent Koha support companies and libraries from around the world.

Release Manager for 3.14: Galen Charlton, USA, Equinox
Translation Manager: D Ruth Bavousett, USA
Documentation Manager, Database Doc Manager: Nicole Engard, USA, ByWater Solutions
Installation Documentation Managers: Mason James, New Zealand, KohaAloha and Samuel Desseaux, France
Quality Assurance Manager: Katrin Fischer, Germany, BSZ
Quality Assurance Team: Marcel de Rooy, Netherlands, Rijksmuseum; Chris Cormack, New Zealand, Catalyst IT; Jonathan Druart, France, Biblibre; Brendan Gallagher, USA, ByWater Solutions; Mason James, New Zealand, KohaAloha; Paul Poulain, France, Biblibre; Kyle M Hall, USA, ByWater Solutions
Release Maintainers: Tomás Cohen Arazi, Argentina, UNC – 3.12.x; Bernardo Gonzalez Kriegel, Argentina, 3.10.x; Chris Hall, New Zealand, Catalyst IT – 3.8.x.
Packaging Manager: Robin Sheat, New Zealand, Catalyst IT
Live CD/DVD Magager: Nguyen Quoc Uy, Vietnam
VM Manager: Samuel Desseaux, France
Bug Wrangler: Magnus Enger, Norway, Libriotech
Newsletter Editor: Daniel Grobani, USA, Samuel Merritt University

Thanks to our volunteers, and here’s to a successful 3.14 Release!

PS. No, it’s not really code name Pi. But it could be!

Registration for this year’s KohaCon, the international users’ conference of the Koha open-source library system, is now open! KohaCon13 will be held October 16 – 22 at the Atlantis Casino Resort in Reno, Nevada, USA.

http://koha-community.org/kohacon/kohacon13/

Call for presentations is now open!  We invite a variety of proposals from information professionals on their projects, experiences, innovations, and tips using Koha.  Presentations are scheduled during the conference on October 16 – 18 and may be short or long and may be intended for different audiences from Koha novice to expert.  Please consider submitting a presentation proposal and  sharing your knowledge with the community.

Reserve a special room rate at the Atlantis.  We have secured special room rates at the Atlantis and our free meeting room space is contingent on a minimum number of room reservations.  Please reserve your room using the special reservation code listed on the Venue/Hotel page.

Visit the KohaCon13 page to register, submit a presentation proposal, reserve a room, and find more information.  More local and travel information will be posted soon.

For more informaiton contact KohaCon13 Chair Nancy Keener, nkeener@washoecounty.us

Koha Community Newsletter
December 2012

Volume 3, Issue 12
ISSN 2153-8328
Edited by Daniel Grobani, Koha Community Newsletter Editor.
Please submit news items to

Table of Contents

• Koha Development
  • Koha 3.10.1 Released
  • Koha 3.8.8 Released
  • Koha 3.6.11 Released
  • Koha Statistics
  • Release Manager’s Newsletter
• Koha Community
  • New Koha Libraries
  • Community Gossip
  • Support Provider News
• Upcoming Koha Events
  • January General IRC Meeting
  • Marseille Hackfest
• Past Koha Events
  • December General IRC Meeting
  • First National Portuguese Koha Meeting
  • New Hampshire User Group Meeting

Continue reading “Koha Community Newsletter: December 2012” »

Welcome to this, my first newsletter as RM. It has been six weeks since the release of 3.10.0. In those six weeks, a lot has happened: 245 patches by 36 developers have been committed.

Major developments

* Bug 7067 – patron self-registration
This feature makes it possible for patrons to edit their own contact information, as well as register for new accounts.
* Bug 8377 – support for embedding HTML5 media in a tab in the details value
This feature allows the playing of media formats supported by HTML5 directly in the web browser.
* Bug 7919 – associate authorized values and patron attributes with specific branches
This feature allows different libraries in the same system to use different authorized values and extended patron attributes.
* Bug 8559 – resolve conflicting item statuses when checking out items that are on hold
Prior to this patch, if a librarian checked out a waiting hold to a different patron it gave the item conflicting statuses. The item showed as both checked out to the different patron, and waiting for the original patron. This has been fixed.
* Numerous Plack and DEBUG-related fixes
Many minor — and not so minor — problems with the DEBUG setting and Plack have been resolved.

Policy

These past six weeks have also seen some changes in release policy. In particular:

Coding guidelines

The coding guidelines have been updated with more details and additional rules (see, for example, PERL14-PERL17). See http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Coding_Guidelines

Commit messages

Good commit messages are crucial for the Quality Assurance process. In light of this, we have new detailed (and mandatory) guidelines for commit messages which should help developers write more useful commit messages. Highlights include a requirement for:
1) an explicit description of what the patch is supposed to do, and
2) a test plan

See http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Commit_messages

Patch reversion

One of the tools in the Release Manager’s toolkit is “git revert” which allows me to easily remove patches that are causing problems from master. After a lot of consideration, I have come to the conclusion that by reverting problematic patches quickly I can ensure that master remains as stable as possible while still taking advantage of the combined testing might of the entire developer community. For the rest of this release cycle I intend to swiftly revert any patches that cause blocker-level bugs and request follow-ups/revisions from the original developer.

I did this, for example, with bug 7167, a new non-linear database update mechanism. I believe that bug 7167 represents an important and useful advance for Koha. However, when I pushed it, jenkins quickly alerted us that it was impossible to install Koha on a clean system. Rather than leave master in an unusable state, I reverted the patch, and there have been several follow-ups addressing some of the problems we identified. Once they have been tested, signed off, and QAed, I will push the entire patchset again, hopefully without any unwanted side effects.

RM’s role in QA

In contrast to the practice during some of our previous release cycles, I have made the decision to NOT QA patches that have been signed off and are awaiting QA (for the most part; I will address the exceptions to this below). I have made this decision for two reasons:
1) Any patch I QA has one fewer sets of eyes on it between composition and pushing.
2) The QA team was elected by the community in order to QA patches. I feel it is not my place to gainsay the community’s decision to elect a QA team, at least when I can avoid it.

There is, however, an exception to this: for patches where no member of the QA team can test the patch, I will — regretfully — QA the patch.

What comes next

There are still 111 patches awaiting signoff and 66 patches that have been signed off and are awaiting QA. Please take a few minutes to sign off on a patch or two, or, if you are on the QA team, QA a patch or two.

Over the next month I look forward to pushing a lot more patches, and seeing a lot more advancement in Koha as we move toward 3.12. In January I intend to release a first “preview” of 3.12 so that non-developers interested in taking a peek at 3.12 can do so.

Welcome to this monthly RM newsletter.

Release Plan

The “Release Plan” announced last month rised many questions, i’ll try to answer here and now.

• ->sept 22th: Any patch can make its way to be included into 3.10 I’ll push any enhancement (new feature) bugfix or that “passes QA”
• sept 22th: feature freeze. This is a very important date. After the Feature Freeze, I won’t push any enhancement that I think is a risk for stability. It will be delayed for 3.12. See next paragraph for more explanation, and a list.
• oct 22th: string freeze. After this date I won’t push anything that changes/introduce a string.
• nov 22th: Koha 3.10.0 is released

Feature Freeze details

The “Feature Freeze” is a period we use to improve the stability of Koha.
Maybe you’re asking yourself: “where instability comes from”?
It comes from the fact that some code introduced has a side-effect on an existing code/feature, breaking it. The volunteers testing things does a good job at searching (and finding) those cases. But sometimes, it’s very hard to detect, it can be seen only when there is a lot of people/volunteers testing, because it requires a specific configuration to appear.
For example, when 3.8 was released, the “hourly loan” feature was working well. But the change in the size of a database column (to contain hours/minutes) broke things like overdue notices.
Those side affect can’t be avoided, but a way to limit them is to give more time to find them.

So, the “Feature Freeze” period is the time where the RM don’t add anything into Koha that has a risk of side effect.

Another example: there is a patch waiting to be tested and sign-offed that says “Normal catalogue detail view in staff client doesn’t show missing serials or subscription history note”. It’s a tiny enhancement, adding some display, that has a 0 risk of side effect, so it could be added after the “Feature Freeze” (if it’s signed off and passes QA of course).

The best option is, maybe, that I list the enhancement submitted that won’t probably be pushed after the Feature Freeze date. This list includes all patches that “need signoff” or “need QA” at date of writing this newsletter.

Patches that I think I won’t push after Feature Freeze (see disclaimer below)

• Bug 8726 – Did you mean? plugin for broader/narrower/related terms
• Bug 8523 – Authority hierarchies only support UNIMARC
• Bug 8435 – new permissions on subscriptions “superserials”
• Bug 8415 – Link Serial with Acquisition
• Bug 8304 – composed authorities Rameau management
• Bug 8211 – Add “subject (broader),” “subject (narrower),” and “subject (related)” options for search
• Bug 7887 – Add Option To Include Items That Will Be Available When Calculating Holds Ratios
• Bug 7572 – Add Clubs & Services Feature
• Bug 7419 – Add authority deduplication script
• Bug 7243 – Do not take rentals as fines
• Bug 7162 – Factorize code for order cancellation
• Bug 7688 – Change subscriptions numbering pattern and frequencies
• Bug 5339 – Parcel closing in acq
• Bug 5335 – More granular VAT
• Bug 7751 – Decrease loan period on items with a high number of holds
• Bug 8137 – Checkout limit by patron category for all libraries
• Bug 7919 – Display of values depending on the connexion library
• Bug 7294 – status “in order”
• Bug 5786 – Move AllowOnShelfHolds system preference to the Circulation Matrix

Patches that I feel I won’t push after Feature Freeze, but it need to be investigated more (see disclaimer below):

• Bug 8484 – Add ability to choose if lost items are removed from a borrowers record.
• Bug 8343 – Editable discount rate and miscellaneous charges during ordering
• Bug 8236 – Prevent renewing if overdue or restriction
• Bug 7957 – Routing lists: manage several routing list for each subscription, and export them as CSV
• Bug 7673 – New patron permissions
• Bug 7295 – list of librarian managing a basket
• Bug 5356 – Shipping billing address improvements
• Bug 5342 – Serial claiming improvements
• Bug 6813 – Acquistions – duplicate search across orders, suggestions and catalog

disclaimer
The 2 previous lists have been made just by looking at the bug description, not at the code. I may change my mind and decide not to push a patch that is not in this list, or push a patch that is in this list and should not be.

What will govern my decision? I’ll ask myself the following questions: which files and modules is this ENHancement modifying ? Does it change database schema ? How large (in lines of code) is the patch ?
An enhancement that does not modify existing files (just adding new files), doesn’t change the DB schema will probably be OK even after the FF date while an enhancement updating circulation rules won’t !

Conclusion
The best option, if you want to promote a patch in this list, is to sign it off (or ask a QA team member to QA it). Anything QAed before sept 22th will be pushed -if it passes the tests I make before pushing-

String Freeze details

Entering the “Feature Freeze” probably mean no more enhancements will be added into the 3.10.

Bugfixes, will be pushed, of course. If a proposed bugfix introduces/changes a string, the release team sometimes ask for an alternate version without such changes, sometimes add the fix into Koha for 3.10, sometimes delay the fix to the next release (if the bugfix is minor)
The “String Freeze” date also means that the 3.10 project is created on http://translate.koha-community.org/, and translators can start their work.

As a conclusion: I hope this change in the release workflow will result in a rock stable release, so early upgraders to 3.10.0 won’t face any blocking bugs.

Important patches pushed in august

I’ve been AFK for 3 weeks in August, but pushed a lot of things before leaving, and many things when coming back : 69 bugs (more than 90 patches) have been pushed. Most of them are bugfixes, only a few are worth being listed on this monthly letter:

Add tab in patron record to show patron’s routing lists (bug 7839)

This add useful information. I’ve pointed that there are a lot of tabs on the patron detail page, maybe some ergonomic tweaking will be made to reorganize things

Re-order administration page to better match configuration priority (bug 8655)

The admin-home.pl page has been reorganized. Everything is still here, but be carefull, maybe not at the same place ! We think this change gives more clarity & visibility to what is more important.

Community organization

As you may already have seen, we’ve started to think of our next release team. I won’t be your RM anymore in november, there is one candidate, Jared. If you want to apply for any role, just reach the wiki page and add yourself (http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Roles_for_3.12)
We will vote on the next IRC meeting (october 10, 10+00 UTC)