Attending:

The March, 2023 Newsletter was discussed.

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• VUFIND-1567 - Update language translation files for release 9.0
  • Next step: DK will close this when the release is packaged up, and will post a comment with the current translation percentages.

Discussion: release 9.0 is currently slated to release with support for PHP 7.4. Should we drop this and move to 8.0 since 7.4 is now at end of life? Or should we consider releasing as-is (to avoid unexpected last-minute dependency problems) but raising the version requirement in release 9.1?

No objections to sticking with 7.4 for 9.0 and bumping to PHP 8.0 for 9.1. Should put a warning on 9.0 release warning of this plan.

Demian proposed releasing version 9.0 in April, as it seems that work is nearly complete, and we just need to allow time for outstanding translation work to be completed.

April 24th was agreed upon as a good date to allow ample time for translation in light of holidays, etc.

One of the areas of potential improvement identified by the recent documentation survey is the approach to PHPDoc comments. Our basic approach hasn't changed much since 2007, but the PEAR standards are now very old, and language features like improved type support render some aspects of the comments redundant. Is there an opportunity to do things in a more modern way without losing the benefits of our current approach?

Possible actions/things to investigate:

• Can we replace some/all of our PEAR style rules with PSR-12?
• Desirable: raise line length from 80 characters to 120 characters (This proposal was received positively).
• Can we reduce redundancy in comments without losing the ability to enforce full/consistent documentation?

Demian will be out of office on the next scheduled call date (April 4) and others will be away the following week (April 11), so it was agreed to push the date back to April 18.

Mario followed up on the Google Scholar issue discussed in a previous call. The http-equiv meta header is causing problems. Mario found a workaround that seems to help. Demian proposed opening a PR so we can discuss whether core changes are needed, and re-evaluate why we're using http-equiv and whether we should do things differently.

Mario also mentioned ongoing discussion about visualizations of author/subject data to present information in different ways to assist researchers. Mario is interested in feedback on tools, technologies and approaches. Stephanie shared linkedjazz.org as an inspirational example. Demian mentioned VUFIND-825 as an early effort at building something like this.

Stephanie offered to help with Bootstrap 5 upgrading and/or other theme-related refactoring. Demian described the current plan (refactoring to components, and using the abstraction of components to make code more feature-agnostic). Stephanie is willing to help with this as needed if time permits.

Mario asked about the status of deduplication. Demian explained the relationship between deduplication and RecordManager, and talked about the advantages of using RecordManager as a complement to and/or replacement for SolrMarc. Demian was not sure whether you could harvest records into RecordManager, generate deduplication IDs, and then export MARC with those IDs injected, but suspects that such a feature might be possible even if it does not already exist; he will check with Ere.

The next call will be Tuesday, April 18, 2023 at 9am Eastern Standard Time (14:00 GMT).