[Koha] Summary of Koha developers' meeting day 1 (4/18/2009)

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

Here are a few quick notes from the first day of the post-KohaCon
developers' meeting held today.  About twenty people attended or
dropped by the meeting in person, with another five or so commenting
via #koha and others following along via Twitter.

After a round of introductions and a little planning of the agenda,
Paul Poulain started the morning with a good overview of the structure
of Koha, C4, and how to write Koha CGI scripts.  Next, Joe Atzberger
presented a tutorial on Git, covering how to clone the Koha
repository, create branches, add commits, generate patches, and submit
them.  After lunch, I continued the Git presentation by showing how to
apply patches and deal with merge conflicts.

The next part of the afternoon was a hackfest, during which several
enhancements and bugfixes were prepared and pushed, including:

* A history file for Koha, docs/history.txt
* bug 3013: significant improvements to the cataloging editor plugin
for setting the 007 field in MARC21 records
* bug 1545: adding the ability to edit the SQL of guided reports
* fixes for low-numbered bugs, including 908, 918, and 948
* a fix for the longstanding MARC21 UTF8 encoding problem for bib
records entered via acquisitions
* another ten or so bugfixes and small improvements

One interesting project that was worked on during the hackfest is
Jesse Weaver's new user interface for setting system preferences that
will help users configure Koha by making the preferences more
self-documenting.  A particularly nice outcome of the hackfest is that
several new and potential contributors had an opportunity to learn the
mechanics of writing and submitting patches, and many of us learned
new tips and tricks for Git.

At the end of the afternoon, several Koha projects items were
discussed.  As a result of these discussions, I will be sending out
proposals for several points, including:

* (Re)starting a weekly update newsletter for changes to Koha 3.2
* I will be calling a monthly IRC meeting to discuss the status of
Koha development.
* Making some improvements to using the bug database to record who is
working on various bugs and enhancements.
* Setting a convention to tag regressions so that they get a higher
priority for bugfixes.
* Making use of the bug voting feature in Bugzilla to help Koha users
and contributors prioritize bugs.

I will be following up on each of these points in more detail in
subsequent emails to the koha and koha-devel mailing lists.

The log of the #koha IRC channel during the dev meeting can be found at

http://koha.org/cgi-bin/logs.pl?recall=recall&saved_query=KohaCon09DevMtg

Needless to say, there will be many blog posts by various people about
KohaCon 2009 and the developers' meeting.  The main tag used for
Twitter, Flickr, and other social network posts is kohacon09.

My thanks to the Koha users and developers who attended today in
person, virtually, or in spirit, and to the KohaCon 2009 committee for
organizing a great conference.  I would also like to give a shout-out
to the Holiday Inn Express for being great hosts.

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
Koha 3.2 Release Manager
VP, Research & Development, LibLime
galen.charlton at liblime.com
p: 1-888-564-2457 x709
skype: gmcharlt