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developers_call:minutes20140304

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VuFind Developers Call Minutes: March 4, 2014

Attending: Filipe Bento, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Benjamin Mosior, Tod Olson, Luke O'Sullivan, Ben Wiens

Agenda

1. Development Updates

JIRA Tickets

  • VUFIND-527 - There has been some recent discussion on this ticket about “bound-with” / “bound-in” relationships; feel free to join in if this topic is relevant to you.
  • VUFIND-624 / VUFIND-847 - Solr-driven “new items” search has been implemented.
  • VUFIND-627 - Advanced search date range handling has been made more generic.
  • VUFIND-953 - This ticket requests a feature to limit the email domains allowed to be used by new accounts when using the Database authentication method. It has been implemented.
  • VUFIND-954 - This was a user problem that did not require VuFind code changes.
  • VUFIND-955 - Several problems were found in Bootstrap theme cart/lightbox code; they have been corrected and pushed out in the 2.2.1 release.
  • VUFIND-956 - This ticket requests AJAX versions of Summon recommendation modules to prevent Summon outages from crashing VuFind. They have been implemented.
  • VUFIND-957 - This ticket tracks the idea of a dynamic cover image generator.
  • VUFIND-958 - This ticket tracks a small cosmetic issue in Bootstrap that is fixed in the 2.2.1 release.
  • VUFIND-959 - This ticket adds record URLs in the dc:identifier field of Dublin Core OAI-PMH responses.
  • VUFIND-960 - This ticket suggests a better workflow for creating accounts from within lightboxes in the Bootstrap theme; not implemented yet.
  • VUFIND-961 - This ticket makes “edit favorite” functionality more tolerant of records that no longer exist in the index.
  • VUFIND-962 - This ticket addresses a Wikipedia author bug; a fix is included in 2.2.1.
  • VUFIND-963 - This ticket reports some unusual behavior related to CAS authentication; Demian will investigate but may require assistance from a CAS user (depending on how easily reproducible the problem is).

Pull Requests

Several PR's pending the 2.2 release have now been merged.

  • #86 / #89 / #94 - These PR's contain some minor fixes related to storage retrieval requests – merged.
  • #87 - This fixes a bug in MultiILS authentication – merged.
  • #90 - Swedish language file improvements – merged.
  • #92 - This adds an ILL feature with Voyager support as well as making some performance improvements to the Voyager driver; Demian will test and merge soon.
  • #93 - This adds an optional Javascript session keep-alive feature – merged.
  • #96 - This adds an LBS4 ILS driver; Demian will merge after receiving more feedback from other LBS4 users.
  • #98 / #100 - These is updates to the VuDL code have been merged.
  • #101 - This improvement to the Aleph driver's configurability has been merged.

2. Development Planning

2.2.1 Release

As mentioned above, 2.2.1 was released on 2/26 to address (primarily) some bugs in the Bootstrap/Bootprint themes.

Performance Testing

A formula (see this thread) has been found for determining how much memory will be consumed by the filter cache. This seems to suggest that our filter cache settings will take up huge amounts of memory, but KLN team is not seeing this in practice with the existing configuration.

Ideal setting depends on many variables – hit ratio, number of records, etc. In Solr admin, there is a “Plugin/Stats” tab which shows a filter cache drop-down where stats can be found for analysis – http://example:8080/solr/#/biblio/plugins/cache?entry=filterCache. (One strategy found “in the wild”: log for three months, use that value).

It seems that a lower default would be justified, but more data is still being gathered to support that decision. At Code4lib, VuFind representatives will touch base with Blacklight developers to see if/how they are addressing this issue.

There was some discussion of the impact of multi-core setup – does the authority core really need/desire the same settings as biblio? Probably not.

Autowarm was also discussed – it may be worth testing with different autowarm settings.

Call Number Normalization

Tod has checked some code into SolrMarc – org.solrmarc.callnum package has been established containing classes for dealing with Dewey/LC call numbers (and UChicago local subclasses as examples). Dewey classes are now fully independent of other SolrMarc components (no dependency on older call number code); LC classes still need further refactoring to eliminate dependencies, but this will eventually be done.

For the browse handler, normalization enhancements are done. Remaining question: do we bundle in call number handlers, and if so, how do we get access to the call number components embedded in the SolrMarc one-jar jar? Accessing one-jar content would require a special classloader. Tod's workaround: manually extract marc-importer.jar from the SolrMarc one-jar into the VuFind browse handler environment. Not very pretty, but it works. A better solution would be nice.

We still need to think more about the packaging mechanism; Tod will continue working on improving the code while we think over the “big picture” issues.

Demian will send an email to the solrmarc-tech list to see if there's interest in a conference at Code4lib to talk about some of these issues.

module.config.php Cleanup

Demian has completed the proposed refactoring.

entityExpansionLimit Setting

Tod found this documentation page. Should we update import scripts to turn off this limit? It is causing problems in SolrMarc on newer JVMs.

This setting was likely introduced as a defensive measure to prevent exploits involving excessive entity expansions in XML documents sent over the net. It's probably safe to turn off the limit in the context of SolrMarc – we just need to see if setting to 0 actually works. Tod will follow up and find someone to test this.

Demian will open a JIRA ticket and do more research; we will discuss again on the next call.

3. Marketing

4. Other Topics?

JIRA has been upgraded due to a security vulnerability.

Next Call

The next call will be Tuesday, March 18, 2014 at 10am Eastern Standard Time (15:00 GMT).

developers_call/minutes20140304.1393948779.txt.gz · Last modified: 2014/06/13 13:13 (external edit)