VuFind Developers Call Minutes: September 18, 2012

Attending: Filipe Bento, Oliver Goldschmidt, Demian Katz, David Maus, Benjamin Mosior, Tod Olson, Sean Purcell, Ernie Simuro

• VUFIND-316 - There has been a lot of discussion on this sharding ticket recently; most of the details have been captured into sub-tickets (see below).
• VUFIND-534 - Ronan has posted a Disqus patch here (for integrating a third-party discussion service with VuFind).
• VUFIND-600 - Some example code and comments related to replacing Aperture with Tika for full-text harvesting have been posted here.
• VUFIND-643 - This ticket discusses VF2-specific details related to porting the multi-backend driver (VUFIND-594). Benjamin plans to do more work on this soon.
• VUFIND-644 - This ticket offers an adjustment to the full text indexing routine to make it more tolerant of unusual data in files. Demian will test this and port it to the Java version of SolrMarc when time permits (but probably not for a little while at least).
• VUFIND-645 - This ticket tracks a bug in the current 2.0beta code – although there are smarts in place to compensate for the situation where a record saved to favorites is no longer available in the index, such records cannot currently be deleted.
• VUFIND-646 - This ticket discusses some issues with running VuFind under SSL; it has been closed since no specific unresolved bugs are mentioned.
• VUFIND-647 / VUFIND-648 - These tickets address bugs specifically related to field stripping used for searching shards with incompatible schemas.
• VUFIND-649 - This ticket points out some unused legacy methods in the Solr code. Demian has removed them.
• VUFIND-650 - This ticket tracks a bug related to exception handling in 2.0's console applications (error messages are not displayed when unhandled exceptions are thrown).
• VUFIND-651 / VUFIND-652 / VUFIND-653 / VUFIND-658 / VUFIND-661 - These tickets multi-index/shard-related bugs and missing features.
• VUFIND-654 - This ticket addresses performing a “health check” to avoid pulling results from broken shards in a sharded Solr environment.
• VUFIND-655 - This ticket requests next/previous record navigation for the Summon module to match the current Solr functionality. This is likely to be much easier to implement in 2.0 than in 1.x.
• VUFIND-656 - This ticket enables sitemapping of multiple cores.
• VUFIND-657 - This ticket provides a mechanism for normalizing call numbers through Solr.
• VUFIND-659 - This ticket describes a problem related to time zone handling by the change tracker code. Demian needs to evaluate the full scope of the issue (requires analysis of Java as well as PHP code); we definitely need to find a solution before the final 2.0 release.
• VUFIND-660 / VUFIND-663 - These tickets address some improvements to the test suite.
• VUFIND-662 - This ticket proposes a strategy for OAuth-based logins. If any volunteers are interested in coding up a patch, that would be a useful next step.

Demian has continued creating plugin managers and replacing explicit constructor calls with service manager requests in an effort to make the code more flexible, testable and extensible.

The install script now offers the option of creating a custom module for storing local code that overrides core functionality.

The Developer Manual is slowly becoming more complete.

Some improvements have been made to logging and error-handling; exceptions thrown during dispatch are now logged and forwarded to an appropriate error page. The “exceptions during rendering” problem still needs to be addressed.

David has continued work on his Solr refactoring and has also begun cleaning up the test suite and thinking about improving the general search model used by VuFind.

Five presentations have been fit into the official schedule. We still have one presentation slot open if someone wants to submit a last-minute suggestion. We could also still use more lightning talks and breakout ideas.

No news this week.

There was some discussion on the mailing lists about the possibility of merging or changing lists, prompted mainly by frequent cross-posting to the general and tech lists.

Nobody on the call seemed to feel there was a need to change the list structure; user education could be used to reduce inappropriate cross-posting.

Tod and Benjamin are working on Shibboleth integration – this will ensure that the 2.0 Shib code gets tested. Demian volunteered to help coordinate merging new Shib features from JIRA into 2.0 as needed (there are currently some outstanding 1.x patches).

The next call will be Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).