VuFind Developers Call Minutes: May 22, 2018

Attending: Leila Gonzales, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Eoin Kilfeather, Ere Maijala, Conor Sheehan

• VUFIND-1241 - Homepage plugins are now implemented through the ContentBlock mechanism; this ticket has been resolved.
• VUFIND-1267 - The RecordDataFormatter has been improved as discussed on this ticket, so the ticket has been resolved.
• VUFIND-1269 - VuFind now supports an enumchron field in ILS driver holdings data; this ticket has been resolved.
• VUFIND-1285 - Controller plugins will likely be eliminated in a future version of the zend-mvc library; this ticket captures the need to replace them with something else.

• #1176 - closed - Opened by accident, then closed.
• #1177 - in progress - This change was proposed due to a problem with a local template; it will probably be closed in the near future without further action but is being left open long enough for discussion.
• #1178 - merged - Bug fix for hierarchical facets
• #1179, #1180 - merged - Work on replacing static factories with factory classes for record drivers and view helpers.
• #1181 - in progress - Refactoring to make cover image code more extensible.

Most disruptive changes are now complete, apart from configuration management (discussed below).

Demian proposes a 5.0 release date of July 16, 2018, with a code freeze on June 18. That gives us time to finish a few more issues if necessary and to obtain translations while still achieving a summer release.

There was a bug report about “sidebar on left” in the record view. Chris is going to work on a fix later this week.

The Alma pull request has been updated significantly, and documentation is forthcoming.

There has been no further work on the FOLIO driver, pending developments from the FOLIO community.

No news.

No news – Jochen is currently on holiday.

Work continues on pull request (#1141). Due to coming changes in zend-mvc 4, it may be worth delaying merging these changes until more is known about how configuration loading will be impacted.

No news.

We'll continue to explore this. There is an expectation that legal processes could take time at many institutions if this is instituted.

Demian will send a poll to mailing lists to measure interest.

The Relais pull request has been merged.

The WebEx account stopped working today; Demian will set up a Zoom account for next time.

Eoin is reviewing some of VuFind's query processing code – particularly the interaction between Lucene query normalization and the query munging process. Currently, some query normalization occurs BEFORE the munging, which can lead to unexpected behavior when dealing with certain characters (like slashes and dashes). Demian provided some background on how this code was refactored in the past and advice on how to test it. A pull request may be forthcoming once more investigation has been completed.

Conor asked about the best way to run VuFind's test suite (as provided by build.xml); in particular, how to run tests without destroying local configuration and other files. Demian suggested simply cloning the VuFind repository in two places – one copy for long-term work where the test suite is not run, and another “disposable” copy for short-term running of the test suite. That is how he manages development at Villanova. Conor agreed to try this approach.

The next call will be Tuesday, June 5, 2018 at 9am Eastern Daylight Time (13:00 GMT).