Attending: Leila Gonzales, Demian Katz, Ere Maijala, Mario Trojan

The October, 2020 Newsletter was discussed.

Demian has begun work on a tool to import data to Solr from CSV files; early work in progress is available in pull request #1761.

VUFIND-1437 has been opened to capture discussion around Javascript configuration options; Mario is taking the lead on implementation. He will open a pull request within the next few weeks, though lockdown-related office-move logistics may delay this slightly.

Psalm is a static analysis tool that can improve the use of types in PHP code (among other things); Demian has opened a pull request (#1764) so that we can begin using it to enhance VuFind code. It can eventually become part of our continuous integration process, once we have had time to evaluate it and set appropriate baselines. If anyone is interested in helping with related clean-up, pull requests are welcome to address some of the open issues revealed by this PR.

There was discussion about increasing our requirements for use of types in new code. Psalm can help with that; once we have had more time to evaluate existing issues, we can consider setting it up so that Travis builds will fail if new code is insufficiently typed.

The record version work in pull request #1581 is going to be one of the major new features of VuFind 7.1. Currently, some finishing touches are being placed on the code before it can be merged, and more testing is still needed. Please evaluate and comment if you are interested.

There was some discussion about record merging vs. version-linking, and the relationship between the versions logic and the deduplication listener. Bottom line: the new version-linking functionality should be complementary and compatible with various other approaches.

As promised last time, Chris and Demian have opened JIRA tickets for all issues raised/discussed during the Summit; they are summarized in the October, 2020 Newsletter. Please vote/comment/claim tickets, and open any that we missed. Video editing is still underway; last month, Chris caught up with posting tutorial videos from past Community Calls, so conference video is next on the list.

On November 2, 2020, a group of interested volunteers (Oliver Goldschmidt, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, André Lahmann, Craig Murdoch, Mohan Pradhan, and Hajo Seng) met to begin discussing the process of formalizing VuFind's community. Demian prepared a community planning wiki page to begin gathering ideas and issues, and these were discussed during the meeting. The group's first action item is to draft a governance model inspired by OSS Watch's example Meritocratic model, incorporating a mechanism for filling the three key roles required by the Open Library Foundation for membership, and linking some of the other community roles and responsibilities to those three key roles. This is intended as a pragmatic step to enable OLF membership to proceed, with the intention that as participation increases, roles and responsibilities can be spread more widely through the community. The group will meet again on December 7, 2020. Between now and then, a first draft of the model will be completed and discussion will begin. If you are interested in becoming more involved in this process, please let Demian know.

Leila expressed interest in becoming more involved in the process.

Mario brought up the issue of PHP 8 compatibility, since the new language version is releasing later this month. Demian opened VUFIND-1457 to ensure compatibility with the next release of VuFind. There was discussion about when VuFind can take advantage of new language features in PHP 8; this will probably have to wait a couple of years, since we will need to retain PHP 7 compatibility until that version reaches end of life. However, it will be possible to take advantage of PHP 8 in local code modules as soon as compatibility is achieved (and Demian does not anticipate major problems, unless there is a hidden issue in a dependency).

The next call will be Tuesday, December 1, 2020 at 9am Eastern Standard Time (14:00 GMT).