[Koha] News of koha 3.0 and poll [important]

[MJ Ray]

This is a translation of the email of Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:25:44 +0100
from paul POULAIN to koha-Infos.  The original is at
http://ob.paulpoulain.com/pipermail/infos/Week-of-Mon-20070319/002112.html
if you want to spot my mistranslations.

*I would like to hear global-list views on the 1 / 2 / 3 survey below.*


So, the message from paul POULAIN:

Hello,

As usual, I'm going to give you some news of Koha 3.0.  *The second
part of this email is extremely important for the users among you.*

Progress
========

* Joshua (the release manage for v3.0) and his company LibLibe have
started tests on this version.  He's found some bugs, as expected, but
finds that it's in an encouraging shape.

The installer has been developed by Henri-Damien as his construction
job: once the sysadmin installation is done, the initial configuration
(language, MARC type, catalogue tables, ...) are set through a web
interface.  It's very practical and more than that, it can be extended
easily.  We can therefore give "public library" example settings, a
"society trust" example, that can be installed in a few clicks.

The hosting platform for koha development (savannah.gnu.org) had a
very large problem at the start of the month.  In summary, multiple
disks broke simultaneously.  It required three days to bring the
platform back up.  But more annoying, it's lost two days of work in
the meantime.  Everyone has had to commit their work of those two days
anew (this concerned LibLime more than anyone in fact, but was within
36hours of causing me problems...) In short, a good week of loss, lots
of energy and stress.

Continuing work (and the survey)
===============

Joshua (and it's his role as release manager) would like to improve
three things before releasing the version:

1- fix the bugs.  No-one can dispute the necessity of that.

2- Finish the code cleanup.  Antoine, who worked for me for four
months on this, didn't finish 100% of the work.  That won't change
anything much for the user, but, in the long term, it's important: it
makes for a more stable software, easier to develop and perhaps also
more attractive for other contributors.  And then 90% of the work is
already done, with 10% to do.

3- Revise all the templates to make something very polished.  He
proposes to use YUI (Yahoo User Interface), some components "freed" by
Yahoo that we can therefore integrate.  Graphically, that will give
something like http://kados.org/stuff/yui_borrowers.png and
http://kados.org/stuff/moremember.png - pretty, isn't it?

There is a problem in doing all that: the time that it takes.  Joshua
doesn't know enough to estimate that for the moment and me neither.
But I'm certain that it won't take days or weeks, but months.

Now, some among you are waiting for Koha 3.0 with barely-contained
impatience.  As I've always promised to put the users first, I ask
your opinion:

1- Argh!  We must release Koha 3.0 as soon as possible.  The code
clean-up concerns you developers alone, so do it afterwards.  And the
improvement of user interface can wait too.  But I need 3.0's features
now!

2- Damn!  Bad news.  But good, we're working with 2.2 well enough and
we can wait 3 months more.  But not more than 3 months, even so.

3- Pah!  I'm very happy with Koha 2.2.  Koha 3.0 can take another 6
months to arrive and I won't be unhappy.

You can just reply 1 / 2 / 3, but you can also say more.  It's
essential that you reply, as many as possible, so I will know in which
direction the francophone community points and so communicate it to
Joshua (who reads us otherwise, even we must translate because he
doesn't speak French ;-) ).

I say that the argument "there's bug XXX in Koha 2.2, so I want koha
3.0" isn't good - if there's a bug in 2.2, we'll fix it in 2.2.x!

PS: to reassure Pascale Nalon, who's done the translation to VF: this
shouldn't impact the translation, or very marginally.

Translatedly,
-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Webmaster/web developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop maker,
developer of koha, debian, gobo, gnustep, various mail and web s/w.
Workers co-op @ Weston-super-Mare, Somerset http://www.ttllp.co.uk/