[Koha] From the Kaitiaki

[Pat Eyler]

                                                   12 July, 2002
To the Koha community;

Bonjour,
Our first French translation did in fact come out last week, which
sets the stage nicely for this weeks news.  We've also seen continued
growth of our developer and user bases (including an installation of
FreeBSD -- Hooray!!)

A continuing issue has been the verification and installation of all
needed Perl modules for Koha.  We've discussed different approaches to
solving it, and it basically comes down to two approaches:

 1)  we could write all of our own functions and ignore existing Perl
 modules.  This would allow us sidestep the problem entirely.  The
 downside is that the modules are very well designed, and very well
 tested -- failing to use them takes more of our development time to
 duplicate their functionality *and* it introduces bugs that we would
 not ordinarily have to deal with.

 2)  we could use the modules and create a 'bundle' to use for
 installing them.  This would allow us to leverage the work done by
 the module writers while still preserving a fairly simple
 installation method.  It will require one of the developers to step
 up to maintaining the bundle itself though.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.  This is one of those
cases where I think the users have a much better idea of what 'the
right thing to do is', so please give it some thought and let us know.


   1.2
     With 1.2.1 out and in use Chris, Steve, and the other developers
     have wasted no time.  If anything they've pick up the pace.
     There is already a release candidate for 1.2.2 (mostly bug fixes
     and small improvements).  We've also seen early glimpses of 1.2.3
     which features a templated version of the OPAC functionality.

     Our 1.2.3 release will be a big deal for Koha.  Templates allow
     us to begin the process of translating the application.  This
     opens Koha to a whole new world of users.

   Translations
     Nicholas has spearheaded the effort to organize the translation
     efforts.  He's started a mailing list for translators
     (http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/koha-translate<> for
     details).  He's also laid out some ground rules for translation
     (<http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=TranslationTeams>
     and <http://lists.katipo.co.nz/public/koha/2002/000858.html> for
     details.  If you'd like to see Koha to your native language,
     please get involved.

   Community
     More work has been going on in the larger community.  Some of
     this work is now becoming visible at
     <http://www.callimachus.org>, which is an umbrella group for
     coordinating the efforts of people working on free software for
     libraries.  Some initial joint projects are being bandied about
     and I think things will start to break loose fairly soon.

I'd like to thank everyone for putting up with my disappearing act
over the last couple of weeks.  I'm currently in the midst of a job
transition, which is impacting just about everything else as well.  If
you're still waiting on me to do something for you, I might require a
gentle reminder (and/or a bit of patience).

Merci,
-pate


Pat Eyler
Kaitiaki of the Koha Project