Koha Release Manager newsletter #7 2012-05

Readers may ask “where are the 5th and 6th RM newsletter?” because the last one available on koha-community.org website seems to be the 4th.

Just after the hackfest that took place in Marseille in april, i’ve published a feedback on what we made during this week. Consider this feedback as the 5th RM newsletter.
In April, I released 3.8. Consider this letter as the May newsletter.

So, what happened in May?

Bugzilla status

As you probably remember, there are 4 steps required for a piece of source code (a patch) to be pushed:

• patch submitted (by anyone) and need signoff
• patch signed-off (by anyone) and need QA
• patch passed QA (by a member of the QA team) and need to be pushed
• patch pushed (by the RM)

The RM & the QA team are doing their stuff quite smoothly. The 3.10 team welcome Mason James (from NZ) as a member of the QA team. There is currently a correct 21 bugs that have been signed off and are waiting for QA.
There is only a few bugs that have passed QA and are waiting to be pushed by the Release Manager.
What has grown a lot in april is the list of patches that needs to be tested and signed. During this month, developers have been concentrated on testing and bugfixing Koha 3.8. But many new features have also been submitted and have been delayed.
There are currently 134 patches needing signoff, please take care of them if you want to see the feature in the next release.

Important patches pushed

JQUERY has been upgraded to the latest version (bug 5184)

You can see jquery changelog at: http://webscripts.softpedia.com/scriptViewChangelog/jQuery-Javascript-Library-Changelog-39111.html

Caching (bug 7248) techniques improved

The caching mechanism has been improved and moved to Koha:: namespace.
CHI driver should be pushed recently, A few patches are underway to finish cleaning caching and have a generic & extensible caching mechanism
For now, CHI goes in conjunction with Memcached driver. But in the future, we can/could use another mechanism, as CHI is a caching framework.

Behaviour change (independantbranches ON, bug 7704)

Before this patch, if the IndependantBranches systempreference was set to yes, if was forbidden to return an item to another branch.
With this patch, if you have IndependantBranches=ON AND canreservefromotherbranches=ON, it’s permitted to check-in a book not in his homebranch.

New dependency (bug 7977)

A new dependencies have been added : libdatetime-format-mysql-perl

YUI autocomplete removed (bug 7747)

The autocomplete feature (available, for example, when you search for a patron in circulation) has been replaced by a jquery equivalent.
No functionnal change, some visual differences, a YUI dependency removed. Overall, more consistency.
(thanks owen)

Datatable integration (bug 8109)

Many patches adding datatables in html tables have been pushed, but there are some still waiting for a sign-off.

Batch edit patrons (bug 5742)

A patch letting you batch edit your patrons has been pushed. It’s the equivalent for patrons to batch editin of items.

Sandboxes improved

The sandbox system has been improved. You can now sign-off the patch you just tested in the sandbox on the sandbox.pl page. Head to the wiki page http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Sandboxes for more information

Community organisation

Some discussions have started and will probably result in decision voted in the next IRC meeting:

• Bugzilla default assignee: there are default assignee for all bugzilla components. Many of the default assignee are not really endorsing the bugs. Marcel and Katrin propose to check all default assignee and remove those who don’t want to endorse components they are default for, replacing them by volunteer or completely blanking the field for this component
• QA enhancement: atm, the QA is made only on bugzilla, and does not result on a signature on the bug itself. Shouldn’t we change our workflow to have QA-er be more visible? While it would result in a visibility improvement, Ian and Marcel, 2 members of the QA team don’t like this idea
• Signing-off a patch for a customer: Some of us are writting patch for a customer that don’t want/know how to sign it off. Should be update our workflow to let someone signoff a bug in the name of the user ? Most seems to agree with the idea, and some insists on the fact that QA should be done by a dis-insterested party
• Use gerrit and update (change?) our workflow for patches: chris has suggested to use a tool like gerrit (http://gerrit-documentation.googlecode.com/svn/Documentation/2.4/intro-quick.html and http://www.slideshare.net/rkabalin/how-mahara-code-revision-works) to do distributed QA on patches
• Adding a Logger module to log and report informations to a log file depending on a logging level the library want at a given moment
• Database structure and coding guidelines: how to name SQL table identifiers/primary keys ?

KohaCon12

Those days, the KohaCon12 take place in Edinburgh, UK, we will have 3 days of hackfest soon, we can expect many new nice things to knock and be announced in my next (june) newsletter.