VuFind Developers Call Minutes: October 2, 2012

Attending: Filipe Bento, Oliver Goldschmidt, Demian Katz, David Maus, Ronan McHugh, Benjamin Mosior, Sean Purcell, Al Rykhus

There has been too much activity since the last call to make a blow-by-blow listing of every ticket productive. A summary:

• Several tickets related to 2.0 unit testing have been created and some have been resolved.
• VUFIND-316 (sharding/multi-index support) has been reopened due to various problems; sub-tickets have been created to address specific issues, and conversation has continued on some of these tickets.
• Improvements have been made to patches related to Tika integration (VUFIND-454, VUFIND-600)
• A few tickets have been closed even though the actual problems were fixed long ago – just oversights (VUFIND-293, VUFIND-402).
• Several outstanding issues have been resolved:
  • VUFIND-612 - 2.0beta meets the basic requirements of this “plugin API” ticket; there is still room for further discussion on this subject, but if changes are needed, newer, more specific tickets should be opened
  • VUFIND-642 - new optional feature to get SQL for manual database structure modification rather than using direct root access from install/upgrade scripts
  • VUFIND-645 - delete missing records bug in 2.0
  • VUFIND-650 - exception handling in VuFind 2.0 console applications now reports errors correctly
  • Upgrading to SolrMarc 2.4 (VUFIND-678) has allowed us to close VUFIND-439 and VUFIND-579 since both of those tickets relate to problems fixed in SolrMarc itself.
• Some tickets have been closed since they are unlikely to ever be resolved:
  • VUFIND-267 - A Virtua problem that was never reproduced.
  • VUFIND-525 - The request for a multi-valued editions field has been closed because the use case provided is better handled by creating a new separate field (detailed comments on a VF2-based solution are found on the ticket).
  • VUFIND-539 - A request for XSLT 2 support (unlikely to be dealt with unless PHP does this natively).
• David has opened several tickets related to his work on refactoring the Solr connection and general search code. VUFIND-674 covers some of the highest-level concepts.
• VUFIND-542 has been updated with a patch allowing multiple primary authors in the index.
• VUFIND-675 suggests building a VuFind module for the Microsoft Academic Search API.
• VUFIND-677 discusses an improvement to autocomplete behavior, but the patch there needs to be made IE-compatible before it can be committed.
• VUFIND-679 is a small improvement to the date timeline recommendation module (do not display on parse error).
• VUFIND-680 discusses some possible indexing improvements.
• VUFIND-681 offers a new recommendation module for displaying random records.
• VUFIND-682 proposes a standardization of HTTP proxying within VuFind 2.0.

There was some discussion of VUFIND-668 and how we can offer a better safety mechanism to prevent unit tests from corrupting live databases (David will research and post a proposal). Also VUFIND-672 - David will close this when his research is complete; he will also post an email soon related to VUFIND-671.

Zend Framework 2.0.2 has been released and fixes a caching problem caused by 2.0.0; Demian has resolved all known outstanding framework-related issues except for the “exception during view rendering” problem, which is scheduled to be fixed in ZF 2.0.3.

Demian has spent some time testing VuFind multisite scenarios (host-based and directory-based) and discovered that configuration for the directory-based scenario is more complex than anticipated. A workaround has been posted in the documentation, but a better solution is needed. Benjamin offered to take a look at this.

The 2.0beta release went out on Monday; all documentation is updated, and all Linux installation notes have been tested. Windows notes could probably use some rechecking if anyone has time to try installing 2.0beta on a clean Windows box.

The next release will be 2.0RC1 – we'll start mapping out goals for this in the coming weeks. David plans to submit proposals for better logging and caching services soon; these would be good candidates for RC1 along with some of his other refactoring work.

Since a lot of development has taken place in the 1.x trunk, and there is also the collection branch that needs to be merged in, it makes sense to have one final 1.x release prior to 2.0. Demian can spend a bit of time finishing this up after the Summit now that 2.0beta is done. We should determine a reasonable release date for this version, which should be the last official 1.x release (though trunk development may continue, if only to allow existing unresolved JIRA tickets to be tested and ported to 2.x).

VuFind 1.3 was released on 1/30/12 – perhaps 1/28/13 would be a good date for 1.4.

The Summit takes place in two weeks. Registration is now closed (but contact Demian if you missed the deadline – we might be able to sneak a few more people in).

We will stream the entire Summit online. Watch the mailing lists for more details on how to access the stream. Video archives will also be available after the event has ended.

Filipe has added information on LibraryCloud and SPLURGE to the open data sources page.

Because of the Summit, the next meeting will not take place until October 30th. If you are not here in person, please feel free to use the usual developers call meeting time as an excuse to watch some of the live stream of the Summit on October 16th!

No other topics this week.

The next call will be Tuesday, October 30, 2012 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).