[Koha] Freight in aquistions?

[Joshua Ferraro]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 1:31 AM, Rachel Hamilton-Williams
<rachel at katipo.co.nz> wrote:
> Joshua Ferraro wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:16 PM, Rachel Hamilton-Williams
>> <rachel at katipo.co.nz> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> This is the specific step that's gone - along with all of simple
>>> acquisistions
>>>
>>> http://katipo.co.nz/gallery/album15/Acquisitions_r_4
>>>
>>
>> That step is still in 3.0, but the shipping costs code was very buggy
>> so that specific field was removed ... If I recall the specific error,
>> you could add a shipping cost, but it wouldn't be calculated in the
>> totals on the invoice page. I believe part of the problem had to do
>> with how the shipping costs were stored in the database, they were
>> indistinguishable from an actual item cost IIRC.> Cheers
>>
>>>>
>>>> I think it got lost in the last version of Koha (another bit of
>>>> acquisitions got removed all together).
>>>>
>>>> You used to put in freight as the first thing when receiving an order,
>>>> so
>>>> that the amount was split amongst all the items in the order, but you
>>>> don't
>>>> appear to be able to do that now.
>>>>
>>>> This is how acquisitions used to work...
>>>>
>>>> http://katipo.co.nz/gallery/album15
>>>>
>>>> I haven't seen plans to put it back, but perhaps Liblime might have a
>>>> view
>>>> on that.
>>>>
>>
>> I've yet to see a contributed version of Acquisitions that had all of
>> these features working at the same time. 3.0 Acquisitions represents
>> the only Acquisitions in a released version that I've seen where all
>> the functionality is actually usable. I suspect that it works for
>> Katipo and others because they run custom code, and/or custom
>> templates, rather than the mainline Koha releases.
>>
>
> I don't recall that we did that specifically, although we did usually do
> custom templates for clients. We still should have some systems running
> simple acquisitions  - however they don't work with the MARC stuff - my
> recollection is that once the MARC stuff came at 2.x acquisitions started to
> come unstuck because it had no "native" awareness of MARC. So it would work
> as long as you had MARC off - but not with MARC on.
I don't mean to imply that Katipo or anyone else is intentionally
withholding code from the community to be mean or something, but the
fact remains that for whatever reason, Acquisitions works for Katipo
clients like HLT ... yet I've never seen a working Katipo-written
acquisitions system in any of the public releases prior to 3.0. My
impression is that Katipo staff never took the time to contribute all
of their code in a way that it would work for the whole community ...
and some functionality remains un-contributed as code on local
installations, or locked up in custom templates that we can't see.

It's really easy to figure out where the differences are if you're
interested. For instance, you could run the Linux utility 'diff'
recursively to compare all of the files in your Koha source tree on
one of these installations ... against, say, a fresh 2.2.9 install. I
suppose that at the end of the day, you can't cry over spilt milk ...
all you can hope to do is learn and move forward ...

> I'm guessing that with later versions it got dropped as that was too hard to
> reconcile as most people moved to MARC.
>
> We have some non MARC systems still running and they use simple (and
> possibly even some original "normal") acquisisitions.
That's a distinction I'm not familiar with, what's the difference
between 'simple', 'normal' and whatever other type there is?

In any event, moving forward, I'd recommend anticipating this problem
and looking for ways to ensure that everyone can run from a public
release, rather than having custom code siloed on local systems. I
suspect it's not only frustrating, but expensive, to have to keep
playing hopscotch to get in sync with the community code every couple
versions. I also suspect that's where Joann's frustration is coming
from (in the other acq thread).

My main point in both of threads is that:

1. Acquisitions never worked the way the documentation in that link
says it did -- at least not in code in our releases or source
repositories. It may have worked for HLT and other Katipo customers,
but that's because the code or templates were different than publicly
available ones.

2. It's not fair to say 'This is the way it used to work' and then
point the finger at others, when in fact, we all know it didn't work
in publicly available code in the first place. The last few RMs have
done our best to fix what was there to be something that is
functional.

3. A successful community process is not to write something and then
walk away, code requires constant maintenance. It's not the case that
one Koha shop wrote a working acquisitions system and another shop
came along and broke it. Really! RMs have to make hard decisions, and
they rely on what available resources the community provides them
with, and if you want your stuff to continue working as is, you have
to 1. Contribute it in a fully-working version, and 2. Maintain it.

Cheers,

Josh


>
> Cheers
> R
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>
>
>



-- 
Joshua Ferraro                       SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
CEO                         migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS