[Koha] Proposal to form Koha Technical Committee

[Chris Cormack]

I feel I have made it fairly clear that I am not opposed to solr. But, and
this is a big but, I will not be accepting for 3.4 a rewrite of C4::Search
that only works with Solr.

If people want Solr in 3.4, then the search needs to work with both zebra
and Solr. I don't think this is unreasonable at all and provides a smooth
transition for any libraries who want to use solr without forcing those who
don't to have to upgrade.

I would hope that any meeting on the subject would have this as its aim. My
aim is to release a stable release in what is now 5 months time. The same
rule is applied for the template work, the new templating system should be
functionally equivalent to the current system there should be utterly no
regression. The same with dbix::class::schema and any rfcs.

So let's move forward on this, time is short if we want solr in 3.4 we need
to start work on making sure it still works with zebra

Chris

Ps my son turned 4 today and I have birthday party tomorrow so won't be
around the net until Monday nz time.

On 20 Nov 2010 17:49, "LAURENT Henri-Damien" <
henridamien.laurent at biblibre.com> wrote:

Le 19/11/2010 22:41, Thomas Dukleth a écrit :
> Reply inline:
>
[snip]>

> Much of the capabilities which Zebra support provides are not being used
> in Koha and we are comp...
As far as I know, solr is succesfully everyday used in many opensource
OPACS, and other projects too (thunderbird, alfresco, Drupal, .... ).
I donot claim that they are better than we do. But why should we doubt
that this solution, widely used, which is a real kind of standard in
indexing engine would be a good one ?
a) Getting and providing Suppport fot that tool would be easier. Solr
community exists.
b) Since it has been used in Vufind, and Blacklight, i think we could
share experiences more easily, Eventually direct bridges between Koha
and those solutions.



>
> There is more than just the problem of losing very good Z39.50/SRU server
> support which wou...
It was done in koha2.2 and as far as I know, without zebra, this feature
still exists in our testing box.
It is just using direct ZOOM search rather than C4::Search::SimpleSearch.
So this valuable feature is still there. And we care not to break
existing features.
Same for the Z3950 server which we wrote a wrapper using
Net::Z3950::SimpleServer. This would allow ppl to expose their
collection as a Z3950 server.


>
> As I have stated previously, C4::Search ought to be rewritten in future
> using prefix query f...
Well, Rewriting the whole Search With PQF would not be handy in many
aspects.  I have thought about that many times. And using PQF still
appears to me not to be the solution.
a) It is really a pain to maintain and analyse.
b) Whenever you need some more feature in your search, you have to add
some more qualifiers, and therefore provide a robust parser.

> Continuing to support Common Command Language (CCL) is trivial because Yaz
> translates CCL to PQF...
Again, we used Data::SearchEngine as a base for coding, and use the
results from qurying Data::SearchEngine
If anyone is willing to write a Data::SearchEngine::Zebra,
Data::SearchEngine::Nutch, Data::SearchEngine::Pazpar2, feel free to do
so. We will contribute not just to our little community. But to the
wider PERL community.


> When
> the opportunity to rewrite the Zebra code would arise, rewriting would be
> much easier w...
This is why we are willing to gather use cases. To build Tests !!!
No tests have ever really been built for C4::Search.
So at the moment, I can't assign your fear of loss of features. Provide
tests and will do our best to make it pass. If it is proven that we
can't then we will talk precisely.
By the way, did you know that the "valuable" feature you told about
searching "The" was not really a zebra feature as you stated. But
provided by the Search itself. It duplicated the old need for null words
in Koha. But then again, there was no tests for that.


>
> I have raised all of these issues on the koha-devel list without much
> specific response. On...
Well I wanted a meeting to be held and we were working on testing and
trying to assing all the raised problems in order to provide you with
more technical details. Expect another message from us soon.

--
Henri-Damien LAURENT
BibLibre

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