[Koha] What's on in koha-devel #9

[Jonathan Druart]

Hello librarians and developers,

I wish you a happy new year, 2017 will be awesome, I am sure :)
At least it will be a great year for your favourite ILS - Koha is
constantly improving and next releases will be even better than the last
ones, as always :)

= Hea =
Some of us are still a bit hesitant about Hea because of the lack of
communication around this project.
It also seems that we would like to improve this tool and the way it
displays data, to make it more attractive.
To answer the first need, Chris wrote a privacy policy file [2]. You can
send us feedback about it if things are not clear enough.
To improve data collected by Hea, I have opened 3 bug reports (actually 1
was already opened):
Bug 14608 will add an administration page for Hea, to make it more visible
and understandable
Bug 17802 will collect ideas (and patches?) about adding geolocation of
Koha's installations
Bug 17803 introduce the idea of collecting the number of libraries per
installation. It will permit to know how many libraries are actually using
Koha (vs the number of installations).
If you are interested in these topics, get involved on the mailing list or
the corresponding bug reports.

= Benchmarks for 16.11 =
I have compared Koha versions from 3.14.x to 16.11.
The results have been posted  on the wiki [3].
Everybody can replay these benchmarks easily, and some of you must do it to
confirm (or not) these numbers.

One important thing is that I noticed  that the template caching system is
not defined by default - however it brings a significant performance boost.
I have opened a bug report (Bug 7533 - Add template_cache_dir to the
koha-conf.xml file) to add the entry to the koha-conf file. This patch will
also add a warning to the about page if the entry is not defined.
If you are running a Koha install hosted by a (good) service provider, it
should be correctly defined. But if you are self-hosted, you must
definitely take a look at this configuration option.

To play these benchmarks I needed to rebuild a database for each of these
different versions of Koha. This job leads me to modify the scripts from
the koha-misc4dev [4] repository.  With these scripts I am now able to get
a Koha installation fully testable (items, reindexation, psgi file, etc.)
with any of these versions in a few minutes. That should be very useful for
developers, especially to benchmark, bisect, archaeological digs or simply
debug.

= Important bugs waiting for love =
Last month I have sent an email to koha-devel to list several important
bugs waiting to be tested or QAed. It was very helpful as (almost) all of
them got the expected love and have been boosted quickly. Note that we
always have these kinds of important bugs, and I will try to think about a
way to keep a list of them. A simple and naive approach would be to list
the major, critical and blocker ones on the dashboard. Any thoughts?
The one we want to see in quickly for now is
Bug 17817 - Repeat this Tag (cloning) not working
It is waiting for QA.
Furthermore if you are confident with SIP you should take a look at the
different SIP patches in the needs signoff (17758 Major, 17665, 17826,
16755, 15418, 13666) and signed off queues (16757, 16895 and 16899).

= Refactoring =
== Remove the biblioitems.marcxml field ==
This is the last call!
Bug 17196 has now 4 independent signoffs, we need (at least) 1 QA guy to have
a look at it.
If it is not pushed quickly, I will block its integration into the next
release. We do not want it to be pushed close to the release date.

== Koha::Patrons ==
I have started to replace the C4::Member::GetMember subroutine with
Koha::Patrons.
You can take a look at bug 17829 to see the progress (check the remote
branch on github). It's a massive change as it impacts a lot of file and it
depends on lot of other patches not pushed yet to master.
Using Koha::Patron will allow us to improve the REST API routes for the
patron module. Moreover it will permit to manipulate patron objects and so
to call the new methods recently added to our Koha::Patron module. That
will make the code more readable than at the moment: only 1 patron
structure will be manipulated and not 1 Koha::Patron object + the hashref
returned by GetMember. Doing so the patron object will be sent to the
templates and that will clean up a lot of scripts from the "members" module.

= Standardize our EXPORT =
Last month I talked about bug 17600. It did not get lot of attention. If
nobody gets involved in the discussion I will put it aside.

= Template Toolkit syntax for notices =
Since Kyle's topic on the koha mailing list [1] did not receive any objections
I will try and coordinate with him to move forward on this subject.

The next general IRC meeting is on February 1st, 14 UTC.
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/General_IRC_meeting_1_February_2017

The next dev IRC meeting is on January 11th, 20 UTC.
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Development_IRC_meeting_11_January_2017
In 2 days!

Hope to see your there!

Cheers,
Jonathan

[1] Template Toolkit syntax for notices -
https://lists.katipo.co.nz/pipermail/koha/2016-December/046773.html
[2] Hea Privacy policy -
http://git.koha-community.org/gitweb/?p=hea.git;a=blob;f=Privacy_Policy.md;hb=HEAD
[3] Benchmark for 16.11 -
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Benchmark_for_16.11
[4] koha-misc4dev -
http://lists.koha-community.org/pipermail/koha-devel/2016-November/043277.html