[Koha] LibLime Enterprise Koha Q&A

[MJ Ray]

"Thomas Dukleth" <kohalist at agogme.com> wrote:
> On Thu, September 17, 2009 07:44, paul POULAIN wrote:
> > Daniel Grobani a écrit :
> >> "We will not be making our git repo public as it contains
> >> customer-sensitive data."
> > Just a short answer: That's a so poor, so illogic, so technically
> > irrelevant, and Josh is a so smart developer, that I simply can't
> > believe LL made it that way !
> 
> I can believe that people do many poorly conceived things when they are in
> a hurry.  I also know that Git is a very robust tool which can be used to
> manage much more than source code data.

Yes, this is a main reason for the difficulty of republishing private
forks.  Not only do you have to make sure that the git HEAD doesn't
contain confidential data that was added in error, but also that the
visible history doesn't show it.

With things like Electronic Data Interchange and securing RFID
terminals on private networks, and (not wishing to insult past
helpers) with contractors who aren't familiar with the all-is-open
FOSS/co-op way of working, it's disappointingly common for things like
account details or encryption certificates to end up in the code.
They shouldn't be there, but on a non-FOSS ILS, it probably wouldn't
matter as long as they get cut out before the full release.

The punishments for publishing personal data are scary enough that to
be sure, I've now resorted to making patch files and applying those to
the gitorious tree that chris has kindly made available to us.  It's a
damn slow process and we only had 3 workers on Koha at any time - I
shudder to think how big a reconcilement Josh faces - but we are
committed to making our Koha a proper public superset of the mainline
and we will get there.  I thought the US privacy laws were less severe
than ours, but I guess companies are more litigious and would sue if
LibLime published any account details.

Even so, our fork was only a temporary convenience - which has
actually turned out to be inconvenient enough that we'll not do it
like that again - and we are committed to merging.  It would be really
good to see a similar commitment to merge with the mainline from
LibLime and not just publish periodically.

Then there are the foundation and asset management questions for LL...

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray, member of www.software.coop Experts in web and GNU/Linux
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