7 June, 2002 To the Koha community; Kia Ora, I'd like to thank everyone for their hard work this last week. I'd also like to thank three individuals have have agreed to help manage the Koha project: Chris Cormack is our 1.2 release manager Paul Poulain is our 1.4 release manager Nicholas Rosasco is our advocacy/recruiting manager I received some good feedback from my letter last week, thanks. I look forward to hearing from more of you as the project continues to grow, please don't hesitate to write to me at <pate@gnu.org>. I'll try to get back to you quickly. Among the other feedback that we got was a notice on the <http://www.oss4lib.com> website. There are a lot of other projects there, I'd encourage you all to take a look at what people are working on. I think that there is a lot of ground for cooperation (for example, the MARC::Record Perl module which we'll be using for our 1.4 release). We've accomplished a lot recently, and it looks like the pace is just going to pick up. I'd like to talk briefly about what's happened and what on the horizon. 1.2 Many more clean ups and improvements have been made. Alan Millar, Mike Mylonas, Finlay Thompson, and Chris Cormack have been particularily active. There are some additional bits of work that should see their way into the 1.2 series as well. The 1.2.0 release is just around the corner, in fact a 1.2.0-rc2 tarball has been cut and is available at: <http://developer.koha.org/koha-1.2.0-rc2.tar.gz>. This release will be coordinated with a number of announcements in fairly high profile areas. This should result in a flurry of testing, use, and improvement that will carry us through a solid series of 1.2.X releases. One of the most exciting enhancements in the 1.2 series will be templates. This will not only allow libraries to easily change the look of Koha at their own site, but will allow us to make translations much easier. 1.4 Paul Poulain, Steve Tonnesen, and Sergey Yanovitsky have been hard at work laying out a database schema for MARC. Now that they're down to dotting I's and crossing T's, they're going to be starting on a clean API for developers. These two pieces will provide the foundation for a stronger, faster, better Koha. Translations In addition to our hopes for Spanish and Polish, Paul Poulain has started a French translation. If you'd like to show your cultural pride, please consider helping translate Koha. Documentation Nicholas Rosasco has started writing our documentation. We already have some volunteers, but could certainly use more. Even if you can only contribute a little time to read it and give us your feedback, or to write a short article, your help will be appreciated. I hope you've enjoyed this note. My plan is to send out a 'State of the Project' note like this on a weekly basis to keep everyone up to date. I'll continue posting them to our wiki[1] as well. Haere ra, -pate Pat Eyler Kaitiaki of the Koha Project [1] <http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=KohaProject>
On Fri, 07 Jun 2002 05:45, Pat Eyler wrote:
1.4 Paul Poulain, Steve Tonnesen, and Sergey Yanovitsky have been hard at work laying out a database schema for MARC. Now that they're down to dotting I's and crossing T's, they're going to be starting on a clean API for developers. These two pieces will provide the foundation for a stronger, faster, better Koha.
Just a couple of suggestions, hoping it isn't too late; 1. Can some of the table and column names be shortened please. When I converted the database to postgresql, some of the automatically generated objects, i.e. sequences and indices ended up with names that got truncated. Fortunately, they were still unique but that was more luck than good management. 2. Remove the hardcoded Horowhenua stuff from the source i.e. the logic dealing with branches and collections.
Documentation Nicholas Rosasco has started writing our documentation. We already have some volunteers, but could certainly use more. Even if you can only contribute a little time to read it and give us your feedback, or to write a short article, your help will be appreciated.
3. IMHO, there needs to be two distinct flavours of documentation. I am not a librarian and need to see the system from a technical/implementation point of view. The prospective users who were evaluating Koha, wanted to see the system from the Librarian point of view to help them make decisions about its usefulness. Glen -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Glen and Rosanne Eustace, GodZone Internet Services, a division of AGRE Enterprises Ltd., P.O. Box 8020, Palmerston North, New Zealand 5301 Ph/Fax: +64 6 357 8168, Mob: +64 21 424 015
On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, Glen Eustace wrote: Thanks for your response.
On Fri, 07 Jun 2002 05:45, Pat Eyler wrote:
1.4 Paul Poulain, Steve Tonnesen, and Sergey Yanovitsky have been hard at work laying out a database schema for MARC. Now that they're down to dotting I's and crossing T's, they're going to be starting on a clean API for developers. These two pieces will provide the foundation for a stronger, faster, better Koha.
Just a couple of suggestions, hoping it isn't too late;
I think we're still early enough on for suggestions to be welcome. One things we're trying to do is develop in small bites. This should make the overall cost of change a bit lower than it would be in a traditional system. (Translation: suggest early, suggest often.)
1. Can some of the table and column names be shortened please. When I converted the database to postgresql, some of the automatically generated objects, i.e. sequences and indices ended up with names that got truncated. Fortunately, they were still unique but that was more luck than good management.
2. Remove the hardcoded Horowhenua stuff from the source i.e. the logic dealing with branches and collections.
I think you'll see this happening as we move along. One of our big desires is that Koha become a systems that works well for everyone.
Documentation Nicholas Rosasco has started writing our documentation. We already have some volunteers, but could certainly use more. Even if you can only contribute a little time to read it and give us your feedback, or to write a short article, your help will be appreciated.
3. IMHO, there needs to be two distinct flavours of documentation. I am not a librarian and need to see the system from a technical/implementation point of view. The prospective users who were evaluating Koha, wanted to see the system from the Librarian point of view to help them make decisions about its usefulness.
I'll let Nick respond to this in more detail, but there is a very nice outline taking shape that includes developer, user, and administrator flavors of documentation. thanks, -pate
Glen
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