12 July, 2002 To the Koha community; Bonjour, Our first French translation did in fact come out last week, which sets the stage nicely for this weeks news. We've also seen continued growth of our developer and user bases (including an installation of FreeBSD -- Hooray!!) A continuing issue has been the verification and installation of all needed Perl modules for Koha. We've discussed different approaches to solving it, and it basically comes down to two approaches: 1) we could write all of our own functions and ignore existing Perl modules. This would allow us sidestep the problem entirely. The downside is that the modules are very well designed, and very well tested -- failing to use them takes more of our development time to duplicate their functionality *and* it introduces bugs that we would not ordinarily have to deal with. 2) we could use the modules and create a 'bundle' to use for installing them. This would allow us to leverage the work done by the module writers while still preserving a fairly simple installation method. It will require one of the developers to step up to maintaining the bundle itself though. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. This is one of those cases where I think the users have a much better idea of what 'the right thing to do is', so please give it some thought and let us know. 1.2 With 1.2.1 out and in use Chris, Steve, and the other developers have wasted no time. If anything they've pick up the pace. There is already a release candidate for 1.2.2 (mostly bug fixes and small improvements). We've also seen early glimpses of 1.2.3 which features a templated version of the OPAC functionality. Our 1.2.3 release will be a big deal for Koha. Templates allow us to begin the process of translating the application. This opens Koha to a whole new world of users. Translations Nicholas has spearheaded the effort to organize the translation efforts. He's started a mailing list for translators (http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/koha-translate<> for details). He's also laid out some ground rules for translation (<http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=TranslationTeams> and <http://lists.katipo.co.nz/public/koha/2002/000858.html> for details. If you'd like to see Koha to your native language, please get involved. Community More work has been going on in the larger community. Some of this work is now becoming visible at <http://www.callimachus.org>, which is an umbrella group for coordinating the efforts of people working on free software for libraries. Some initial joint projects are being bandied about and I think things will start to break loose fairly soon. I'd like to thank everyone for putting up with my disappearing act over the last couple of weeks. I'm currently in the midst of a job transition, which is impacting just about everything else as well. If you're still waiting on me to do something for you, I might require a gentle reminder (and/or a bit of patience). Merci, -pate Pat Eyler Kaitiaki of the Koha Project