[Koha] What's on in koha-devel #13

[Jonathan Druart]

Hello librarians and developers,

I have a lot of things to tell you :)

First, Koha 17.05 is out! I would like to congratulate Kyle and all the
release team!
It includes 7 new features and many enhancements and bug fixes.
You can find the release notes on the website :
https://koha-community.org/koha-17-05-released/
I would like to highlight a feature that I am talking about for months now,
Hea version 2

= Hea v2 =
The development is now in the last version of 3.22.x and has been
backported to all supported releases.
So if you are using 3.22, 16.05 or 16.11 you should upgrade to (at least)
3.22.21, 16.05.13 or 16.11.08 and share with us information about your
libraries!
See the global map to see all libraries
https://hea.koha-community.org/libraries-on-a-map (just a few at the
moment, we are waiting for you!)
See an example of the detail of a Koha installation with several
libraries:  https://hea.koha-community.org/libraries/425
You can tune and choose the information to share with the community on a
new administration page. You can find it under "Administration › Usage
statistics". I really hope to see a whole map full of libraries in the next
weeks :)

= 17.11 development has  started =
17.05 is out, that means the next development cycle has just started. I
have been elected to take the lead as Release Manager for this one.
I announced in my RM proposal (
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Proposal_for_RM_17.11_joubu) that I
wanted to integrate more people in the team. To this end, I needed to know
1) who is willing to dedicate time for the next 6 months, 2) what are the
needs of everybody and 3) coordinate and assign tasks to ease and speed the
integration of patches.
As I am not a politician I will try and do what I said.
You may have noticed that I already started, here are the different actions
that have already been triggered:

== Contact people  ==
I have sent an email to 1) the support companies, 2) the contributors and
3) the general list (
https://lists.katipo.co.nz/pipermail/koha/2017-May/048066.html) to ask
them/you filling a form (
https://framaforms.org/ready-to-help-the-koha-community-1493918217), to
collect ideas/needs on what we could work on the next release and who is
going to help.
I have received 40 answers so far, for a total of 62 persons and 852h per
months.
29 support companies, 6 libraries and 5 volunteers. That's a good start,
but quite a lot of (active) support companies did not answer yet.
If you are not an employee of a support company, you can still fill the
form!

== A new tool - kanban ==
To coordinate and assign tasks I suggest a new tool that is quite easy to
use: a kanban.
You can find it at https://tree.taiga.io/project/joubu-koha-rm-1711/kanban
There is a wiki page to explain a bit how it works:
https://tree.taiga.io/project/joubu-koha-rm-1711/wiki/home
It will be a very important tool for the next release, so if you are
involved directly or indirectly in the Koha community (translation,
documentation, write or test patches, etc.) you should join us if it is not
done yet.
For instance we are currently reworking our entry points on the wiki to
welcome new contributors, there is a task on the kanban subdivided in
several tasks: https://tree.taiga.io/project/joubu-koha-rm-1711/us/21

== Welcoming new contributors, a priority ==
As I just said previously we are focussing on welcoming new contributors,
if you are new and willing to help us it's certainly the best moment to do
it. You should just wait a bit to let us rebuilt our wiki and give you the
desire to help!

If you always wanted to dive into the Koha code, we are writing a tutorial
to help and guide you throughout the different steps of a patch: write a
patch, attach it to the bug tracker, sign it off, etc.
It is called koha-howto and you can find more information about it on the
kanban. The official announcement should arrive soon.

= Collaborative what's on =
Heh yeah, I am sure some of you are sick of my English grammar and my
obsession for the wiki syntax in my emails :)
Since I guess other developers would like to share what they did over the
previous month I have created a pad (
https://annuel2.framapad.org/p/What_s_on_in_koha-devel) where everybody can
contribute to the next "what's on in koha-devel" email. Feel free to add
stuffs to this page when you want to highlight something.

= Push refactoring patches soon =
I have a lot of refactoring patches that are in the queue for too long. I
really would like to see a collective effort done on them.
They will lead to cleaner and more flexible and maintainable code. We have
seen lot of bug recently that would have been avoided with them.
See the kanban and filter on the "Refactoring" Epic to see what must be
done quickly.

Do not forget the IRC meetings!
If you want to tell us something or highlight a problem, start a
discussion, it is the place to do it (do not forget to add the topic on the
agenda!)

The next general IRC meeting is on June 7th at 13 UTC.
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/General_IRC_meeting_7_June_2017

The next dev IRC meeting is on June 14 at 21 UTC
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Development_IRC_meeting_14_June_2017

Cheers,
Jonathan