Hello librarians and developers, I wish you a happy new year, 2017 will be awesome, I am sure :) At least it will be a great year for your favourite ILS - Koha is constantly improving and next releases will be even better than the last ones, as always :) = Hea = Some of us are still a bit hesitant about Hea because of the lack of communication around this project. It also seems that we would like to improve this tool and the way it displays data, to make it more attractive. To answer the first need, Chris wrote a privacy policy file [2]. You can send us feedback about it if things are not clear enough. To improve data collected by Hea, I have opened 3 bug reports (actually 1 was already opened): Bug 14608 will add an administration page for Hea, to make it more visible and understandable Bug 17802 will collect ideas (and patches?) about adding geolocation of Koha's installations Bug 17803 introduce the idea of collecting the number of libraries per installation. It will permit to know how many libraries are actually using Koha (vs the number of installations). If you are interested in these topics, get involved on the mailing list or the corresponding bug reports. = Benchmarks for 16.11 = I have compared Koha versions from 3.14.x to 16.11. The results have been posted on the wiki [3]. Everybody can replay these benchmarks easily, and some of you must do it to confirm (or not) these numbers. One important thing is that I noticed that the template caching system is not defined by default - however it brings a significant performance boost. I have opened a bug report (Bug 7533 - Add template_cache_dir to the koha-conf.xml file) to add the entry to the koha-conf file. This patch will also add a warning to the about page if the entry is not defined. If you are running a Koha install hosted by a (good) service provider, it should be correctly defined. But if you are self-hosted, you must definitely take a look at this configuration option. To play these benchmarks I needed to rebuild a database for each of these different versions of Koha. This job leads me to modify the scripts from the koha-misc4dev [4] repository. With these scripts I am now able to get a Koha installation fully testable (items, reindexation, psgi file, etc.) with any of these versions in a few minutes. That should be very useful for developers, especially to benchmark, bisect, archaeological digs or simply debug. = Important bugs waiting for love = Last month I have sent an email to koha-devel to list several important bugs waiting to be tested or QAed. It was very helpful as (almost) all of them got the expected love and have been boosted quickly. Note that we always have these kinds of important bugs, and I will try to think about a way to keep a list of them. A simple and naive approach would be to list the major, critical and blocker ones on the dashboard. Any thoughts? The one we want to see in quickly for now is Bug 17817 - Repeat this Tag (cloning) not working It is waiting for QA. Furthermore if you are confident with SIP you should take a look at the different SIP patches in the needs signoff (17758 Major, 17665, 17826, 16755, 15418, 13666) and signed off queues (16757, 16895 and 16899). = Refactoring = == Remove the biblioitems.marcxml field == This is the last call! Bug 17196 has now 4 independent signoffs, we need (at least) 1 QA guy to have a look at it. If it is not pushed quickly, I will block its integration into the next release. We do not want it to be pushed close to the release date. == Koha::Patrons == I have started to replace the C4::Member::GetMember subroutine with Koha::Patrons. You can take a look at bug 17829 to see the progress (check the remote branch on github). It's a massive change as it impacts a lot of file and it depends on lot of other patches not pushed yet to master. Using Koha::Patron will allow us to improve the REST API routes for the patron module. Moreover it will permit to manipulate patron objects and so to call the new methods recently added to our Koha::Patron module. That will make the code more readable than at the moment: only 1 patron structure will be manipulated and not 1 Koha::Patron object + the hashref returned by GetMember. Doing so the patron object will be sent to the templates and that will clean up a lot of scripts from the "members" module. = Standardize our EXPORT = Last month I talked about bug 17600. It did not get lot of attention. If nobody gets involved in the discussion I will put it aside. = Template Toolkit syntax for notices = Since Kyle's topic on the koha mailing list [1] did not receive any objections I will try and coordinate with him to move forward on this subject. The next general IRC meeting is on February 1st, 14 UTC. https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/General_IRC_meeting_1_February_2017 The next dev IRC meeting is on January 11th, 20 UTC. https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Development_IRC_meeting_11_January_2017 In 2 days! Hope to see your there! Cheers, Jonathan [1] Template Toolkit syntax for notices - https://lists.katipo.co.nz/pipermail/koha/2016-December/046773.html [2] Hea Privacy policy - http://git.koha-community.org/gitweb/?p=hea.git;a=blob;f=Privacy_Policy.md;h... [3] Benchmark for 16.11 - https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Benchmark_for_16.11 [4] koha-misc4dev - http://lists.koha-community.org/pipermail/koha-devel/2016-November/043277.ht...