Koha Release Manager newsletter #9 2012-07

Welcome to this monthly RM newsletter.

Release Plan

I have a very important announcement about the release: The official release of Koha 3.10.0 is delayed by one month. For Koha 3.4 and Koha 3.8, we faced some nasty bugs that were not detected before the release. We think the “feature freeze” was too short to identify all potential problems.
That’s why I have the following plan, that delay the release by one month:

• now->sept 22th => development process
• sept 22th => feature freeze, no more large or core enhancements pushed for 3.10, whatever the date of submission of the patch.
• oct 22th => string freeze, no more string changes
• nov 22th => Koha 3.10.0 is released

If you plan to upgrade your version immediately when the new one released, please note that the release will be made on Nov, 22th.
I could, if some of you request it, release a 3.10.0RC1 (“Release Candidate”) on Oct 22th, for early adopters. If you’re interested in such a RC1, let me know !

Bugzilla status

During last month, 70 bugs had one or more patches pushed in “master” branch, that will become Koha 3.10 in a few month.
There are (too) many patches signed off and waiting for QA: 44 when I write this newsletter.
The queue of patches needing to be tested and signed-off is large too: 111. Around 1/3rd of them are bugfixes, all other are enhancements.

Important patches pushed

solr 1st step(bug 8233)

The first step of the work to integrate solr as a search engine has been pushed. If you look in system preferences, you’ll see that there is a “SearchEngine” new syspref. It is set to “zebra” by default, which means nothing is changed in Koha behaviour. But if you swith the syspref to solr, you’ll activate solr.
Be carefull = this is highly experimental, and should not be used in production !
If you want more information, you can head to the wiki: http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/SearchEngine_Layer_RFC
There are a lot of things to do to fully integrate solr into Koha. That won’t be ready for 3.10, but, hopefully, it will be OK for 3.12.

rebuild_zebra_sliced.sh (bug 7286)

This script is in misc/migration_tools, and is very handy to index a large catalogue that has some biblios having a problem. It slices the database in smaller chunks and try to index each chunk separately.

checkNonIndexedBiblios.pl (bug 6566)

This script will check if each biblio can be found by zebra (by searching the biblionumber). If a given biblio can’t be found, a flag let you request, if you want, a re-indexation.
This script can be setup as a cron job, as it has some parameters to make it almost silent, just reporting everything went well if there is no “disappeared” records.

Additional information for support in About page (bug 8301)

Marc Véron submitted a patch for a very nice enhancement: the “About” page now has a tab showing irrelevant or inconsistencies in the setup of your Koha. It’s just a first step for now, many checks can be added, but that’s a very good idea !

Replacing YUI jquery (bugs 8283 and 8281)

We continue replacing YUI by jquery. The bug 8283 removes the following files:

• /prog/en/lib/yui/cookie/cookie-debug.js
• /prog/en/lib/yui/cookie/cookie-min.js
• /prog/en/lib/yui/cookie/cookie.js

The bug 8281 removes files in the following directories:

• /prog/en/lib/yui/yuitest/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/yuiloader/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/yahoo/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/yahoo/yahoo-debug.js
• /prog/en/lib/yui/uploader/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/treeview/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/tabview/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/swfstore/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/swfdetect/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/swf/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/stylesheet/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/storage/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/slider/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/selector/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/resize/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/reset/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/progressbar/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/profilerviewer/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/profiler/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/paginator/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/logger/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/layout/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/imageloader/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/imagecropper/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/history/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/grids/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/get/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/fonts/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/event/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/event-simulate/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/event-mouseenter/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/event-delegate/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/element-delegate/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/editor/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/dom/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/datemath/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/datatable/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/connection/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/colorpicker/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/charts/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/carousel/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/calendar/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/base/
• /prog/en/lib/yui/assets/

If you find something wrong and see that there is still a reference to one of those files, add a comment to bug 8283 !

Max fines in circulation matrix (bug 7420)

The max fines was a system preference. Now we still have the system preference, for total fine maximum, and can also define the max fine for each late document at issuing-rules level (branch/patron category/item type)

New dependencies

The following dependencies have been added:

• HTML::FormatText
• Text::Unaccent

Many dependencies are added by solr: Data::Paginator, Data::Pagination, JSON::Any, MooseX::Storage, MooseX::Types, String::RewritePrefix, Time::Progress, Test::MockModule. They are not needed if you don’t use solr, thus they are not marked as required, but if you plan to play with solr, you’ll need them.

KOCT translatable

The Koha Offline Circulation Tool, a firefox plugin, is now translatable. I pushed a patch that add this feature and the translation to french. Some volunteers sent me translations to spanish, german, galician and italian.

It’s very easy to add a translation, just head here :
http://git.koha-community.org/gitweb/?p=contrib/global.git;a=tree;f=koct/chrome/locale;hb=72ba809c45caca19d8dc4e438aef55eb56ca9fb4

(in koct/chrome/locale directory if you clone the git repo)

cp -r en-US yourlocale-language
cd yourlocale-language

translate the 2 tiny files koct.dtd and koct.properties

git add yourlocal-language
git commit
git format-patch

send me the patch, I’ll push it.