Attending: Betina Schnepf, Oliver Goldschmidt, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Juha Luoma, Ere Maijala, Hajo Seng, Mario Trojan

The June, 2021 Newsletter was discussed.

Demian has continued to work on this, and has incorporated some feedback from Ere. The final step is writing tests and addressing some edge cases; he will work on that this week.

No news.

No news.

No news.

No news.

Mario did lots of tests and had no problems – good news so far. In migrating from CentOS to Ubuntu and MariaDB to MySQL 8, he has run into problems connecting to MySQL 5 with MySQL 8 clients, though these issues are not directly related to VuFind. Mario pointed out that MySQL 8 uses utf8mb4 by default, so this problem may solve itself over time; perhaps no specific action is needed. There was discussion of whether upgrading from a non-utf8mb4 MySQL 5 to MySQL 8 would cause problems; Mario did not think there would be problems as long as you do a MySQL dump and import, but does not have specific evidence to support this.

Ere suggested that there are possible problems with foreign key relationships if different tables have different encoding types. He proposed changing to the new encoding now to reduce compatibility problems in the future.

We should do experiments about character widths; are widths bytes or characters? Is behavior different for CHAR vs. VARCHAR? Demian will try to take a look at this if no one else gets there first.

Ere may be able to help with some experiments, but probably not in the short term due to upcoming holidays.

Ere pointed out that the column size limits of MySQL 5.5 may be a problem here. Demian proposed raising VuFind's MySQL requirement to 5.7, since that is currently the lowest version which has not yet reached end of life.

Demian proposed finishing this conversation on the JIRA ticket.

Pull request #1967 has been merged.

VuFind 7.1.1 was released on schedule, on Monday, July 5.

We need to set a release date for VuFind 8.0 soon, but time ran out in yesterday's PMC meeting before this could be determined. Outstanding work can be found in the 8.0 JIRA version and the 8.0 GitHub milestone. These tickets and pull requests were discussed and prioritized.

All of the outstanding work which adds translation keys has already been merged, so Demian will begin requesting translation updates from volunteers this week.

Solr 8 remains a challenge because of the lack of an official compatible SolrMarc release; Demian will move forward on pull request work with a custom build and will keep advocating for a new official release in the meantime.

Author punctuation indexing is a high priority.

Changes with backward compatibility breaks should be prioritized. Demian hopes to work on most of those this week.

XSLT improvements can probably wait.

#1424 is useful but seems to be stalled for now; can probably be deferred to 9.0 unless the participants resume activity very soon.

#1709 should be reviewed, but can probably be deferred.

#1799 would be useful due to current Javascript recommendations. Not urgent and can wait if necessary.

#1791 is actively being worked on at National Library of Finland; not sure if it will be done in time.

#1926 / #1962 provides a useful mechanism that will underlie the future theme, and which should improve readability. Some work on Javascript icons still needs to be done. Ere will take a look and offer feedback on this.

#1874 is nearly done but doesn't play well with Markdown. Demian will write some test cases to cover this.

#1934 needs follow-up – Demian will talk to Brad.

There was discussion about the new theme – it was agreed that 8.1 is a more realistic target for this than 8.0. The strategy of incremental improvements to the bootstrap3 theme, leading into tools which support development of a new framework-agnostic theme. Bootstrap 3 has reached end of life, so a new theme is a critical need.

Chris will look into Bootstrap 5 migration from a feasibility/workload perspective.

Demian suggested looking for opportunities to abstract more to view helpers to ease migration pains.

Ere proposed working to use modern HTML features in more places to reduce the reliance on Bootstrap3 in the theme (i.e. replace Bootstrap grid with flex).

Demian proposed August 16, 2021 as a possible release date. However, due to vacation schedules, this would limit Ere's ability to participate in the work leading up to the release, so a later release may be better. This has to be weighed against the desire to get a release before the start of the Fall semester. Demian will write to the PMC to discuss this issue further.

The WOLFcon event was a success; recordings of VuFind-related sessions can be found in the WOLFcon 2021 VuFind YouTube Playlist.

Due to the length of the VuFind 8.0 release discussion, this recording was deferred until later.

Mario observed that there is inconsistent language in the English translation file (favorites vs. saved items). General consensus was to use “Saved Items” instead of Favorites (more general term, and less concern with UK vs. US English). Mario will open a pull request to normalize this.

The next call will be Tuesday, August 3, 2021 at 9am Eastern Daylight Time (13:00 GMT).