Writing this down so I don't forget.
Have PACMon display a list of each upgrade that a PAC needs, and include a way of ignoring certain updates, with option of viewing the ignore list. Then click upgrade and it will automatically send message to the PACs to get updates. Also include display of seeing which PACs need which updates. These tasks would be perfomed using apt and could include custom repositories if special versions of software are required.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Post-KohaCon news
From Galen Charlton,
- (Re)starting a weekly update newsletter for changes to Koha 3.2
- [Galen] will be calling a monthly IRC meeting to discuss the status of Koha development. The next meeting will be Wednesday, 6 May 2009 at 19:00 UTC.
- Making some improvements to using the bug database to record who is working on various bugs and enhancements.
- Setting a convention to tag regressions so that they get a higher priority for bugfixes.
- Making use of the bug voting feature in Bugzilla to help Koha users and contributors prioritize bugs.
Can you help Koha?
The Koha project is seeking:
- Quality Assurance manager(s), to review all patches that are sent in to uphold a particular level of quality among the Koha code base. It was suggested that perhaps this be a funded position through an organization or the KUDOS user group since it would take a significant amount of time. It was also suggested that if a QA manager can not be found that developers do more peer review and sign-off on each others patches.
- Bug wrangler(s), to review the bugs at http://bugs.koha.org and make sure that old bugs are closed and all bugs are valid. The number of open bugs listed at the Koha bugzilla site is currently 827.
- Funding or development of core code re-factoring, to clean existing Koha structure, make the entire development process more efficient, and increase code speed and readability. It is hard to find a specific library to want to sponsor an enhancement that would be something that only takes place behind the scenes, so it was suggested that this may fall to a group like the KUDOS user group.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Koha Thinking Outside the Box
Do we need MARC records? We do need the ability to import and edit in MARC record format, by why do we store it in the database in that format? In this day and age where searching technology has advanced considerably, why are we still cataloging in a format that hinders search results and is much more time consuming then taking a Google approach and doing a full-text type search.
Caching would greatly improve performance. Using memcached would greatly increase this because it would store more information in memory. Nginx is a substitute to apache and apparently works very well with memcached and also would increase performance. Nginx talks directly to kernel and we be incredibly fast at serving static content. The NY Times profiler is a great tool to take a look where are the slow areas of a project. It would be great if someone could intstrument a way to make it easy to run the profiler against Koha. Idea for re-writing major dependcies of Koha like MARC and re-submitting it to CPAN. Using Yslow with Firebug extension is a good one to help determine what is taking a long time to load for front-end web sites.
Switch the sessions and zebraqueue table to MyISAM because innodb never shrinks an only grows and grows.
Caching would greatly improve performance. Using memcached would greatly increase this because it would store more information in memory. Nginx is a substitute to apache and apparently works very well with memcached and also would increase performance. Nginx talks directly to kernel and we be incredibly fast at serving static content. The NY Times profiler is a great tool to take a look where are the slow areas of a project. It would be great if someone could intstrument a way to make it easy to run the profiler against Koha. Idea for re-writing major dependcies of Koha like MARC and re-submitting it to CPAN. Using Yslow with Firebug extension is a good one to help determine what is taking a long time to load for front-end web sites.
Switch the sessions and zebraqueue table to MyISAM because innodb never shrinks an only grows and grows.
Koha Sponsoring Discussion
This is a late post, but I wanted to write down some information from the sponsorship talk that occurred on the last session of the Koha Con users conference(April 17, 2009).
There was a heated discussion in regards to the best way for the community to get better about informing each other what projects are being sponsored and how best to do resource sharing. It was agreed upon that the community would use the existing to Bugzilla (http://bugs.koha.org) to input enhancement work and sponsored development. Since Bugzilla doesn't include fields for all the information we'd like to see about sponsored development features it was suggested that there be a sort of template/example bug placed so that others could see all the information that needed to be included into the comments field.
Many people are hoping that with this method if someone doesn't have money to sponsor development or would like to help partially fund a development it will make it possible for others who are also interested in the idea the add feedback or even contribute.
I like this idea, however, ultimately I would like to see a better tool developed as it could have a very positive impact on the Koha community. If there were a way for vendors to bid on features directly from this tool and a way for libraries or individuals to contribute to the feature right from the browser, it would just make the entire process much easier and efficient. You would be able to have a meter or similar feature to say something like, "Only $200 left needed to sponsors this project". It will also make it easy for people to vote and make certain feature requests more of a higher priority without having to search through the thousands of bugs in bugzilla. This type of system could also have a method for people to say I have $1000 to offer for this project, who would be interested in developing it.
Does this type of service exist anywhere is there any type of open source tool similar? Could this be a website with support for many different projects to organize their development efforts?
There was a heated discussion in regards to the best way for the community to get better about informing each other what projects are being sponsored and how best to do resource sharing. It was agreed upon that the community would use the existing to Bugzilla (http://bugs.koha.org) to input enhancement work and sponsored development. Since Bugzilla doesn't include fields for all the information we'd like to see about sponsored development features it was suggested that there be a sort of template/example bug placed so that others could see all the information that needed to be included into the comments field.
Many people are hoping that with this method if someone doesn't have money to sponsor development or would like to help partially fund a development it will make it possible for others who are also interested in the idea the add feedback or even contribute.
I like this idea, however, ultimately I would like to see a better tool developed as it could have a very positive impact on the Koha community. If there were a way for vendors to bid on features directly from this tool and a way for libraries or individuals to contribute to the feature right from the browser, it would just make the entire process much easier and efficient. You would be able to have a meter or similar feature to say something like, "Only $200 left needed to sponsors this project". It will also make it easy for people to vote and make certain feature requests more of a higher priority without having to search through the thousands of bugs in bugzilla. This type of system could also have a method for people to say I have $1000 to offer for this project, who would be interested in developing it.
Does this type of service exist anywhere is there any type of open source tool similar? Could this be a website with support for many different projects to organize their development efforts?
Koha Dev Workflow Tips and Tricks
pieces "borrowered" from Nicole Engard blog post (thank you!)
Git
Chris - Git has a built in garbage collector $ git gc - if you run it after creating a branch and before checking it out, makes switch branches much faster (make a branch, run this and then checkout the branch).
Joe - has a script he makes on different servers that he uses to get his shell to where he wants it to be for testing, it sets his self created variables and standard values (http://blogs.liblime.com/developers/2009/04/19/simple-shell-trick/). Also he posted a good tip on the LibLime blog: http://blogs.liblime.com/developers/2009/04/10/simple-git-trick-for-bash/
Galen - One of the things that he does since he can’t claim to have the visual design skills that Owen does - he has become a real stickler about the HTML that is on the OPAC & Staff client - making it appear as XHTML. There are tools in Firefox that can make for a good development environment: Fire Bug, for validation the HTML validator plugin in excellent at doing it quickly without submitting your site to an online validator, Firefox accessibility plugin lets you run automated tests against your site to meet requirements for ADA, Also the web developer plugin, Yahoo! Dev tools are slow, but they provide valuable info. Something that is useful, but not a dev tool, is the Zotero plugin (citation manager) www.zotero.org — geared toward people to do lots of research online.
-screen command very useful! Look up example .screenrc files
-cluster ssh, ability to have multiple ssh sessions open and run all commands at same time http://sourceforge.net/projects/clusterssh/
-sshfs mount a remote file system
-nohup will run script in the background which is good for like doing a zebra rebuild in case your ssh session gets disconnected
grep for file and | to xargs
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