[Koha] A brief overview on Koha 3 Beta 2

[José Miguel Parrella Romero]

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Greetings,

Yesterday I downloaded and installed K3B2 on a personal server (IBM
System X3200, Xeon dual-core, 512 MB. RAM) We were previously using Koha
3 Alpha on a highly loaded VPS (Xen DomU, 256 MB. RAM) and also Koha
2.2.7 to 2.2.9. These are our showcase/development installations. All of
our installations go on Debian Etch.

I'd really recommend to follow the INSTALL.debian notes by the LibLime
folks -- maybe the only think that could be tweaked in that document is
to cite what Perl packages are available in Debian in order to avoid
installing them from CPAN (except for packages such as DBD::mysql) --
BTW, MJ, what's the state on Debian packages for Koha?

For the first time, I installed Koha using the Zebra daemon. We weren't
previously compelled to do so (we've done a couple migrations from
proprietary systems, around 6K records, so we didn't need it) but now
things like search by approximation are working fine (previously they
didn't -- in K2 and K3 w/o Zebra)

We work with spanish-speaking libraries; therefore we need to introduce
latin characters (á, é, í, ó, ú and ñ) and retrieve them accordingly --
while we used the leader field to specify UTF-8 encoding and we handled
the decoding/encoding of strings with Perl, we couldn't retrieve with or
without the special characters. That is, a record for 'José' could only
be retrieved with 'José' and not with 'Jose' -- this is working in K3.

In K3 Alpha we couldn't retrieve a previously added authority, by any
means. This is working flawlessly in K3 Beta.

We are experiencing a performance problem, with a 404.pl script
consuming up to 100% CPU when browsing the OPAC -- I'll study this with
more detail this week.

I see Z39.50 was revamped in K3 Beta -- that's great. This functionality
is now more fresh and useful, and AFAICT, with Zebra having Z39.50
server capabilities, this could greatly improve communication between
Kohas and between Kohas and proprietary, to-be-freed, ILSs.

We expect to be deploying K3B2 real soon now in an important library, we
believe its production-ready (despite the beta name on it) and we
recommend new users to try K3 instead of going with 'stable' 2.2.9: the
new features and functionalities are a no-miss.

Congratulations, team
Jose
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