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developers_call:minutes20151208

VuFind Developers Call Minutes: December 8, 2015

Attending: Chris Delis, Guenter Hipler, Demian Katz, André Lahmann, Jochen Lienhard, Ere Maijala, Oliver

Agenda

1. Development Updates

JIRA Tickets

  • VUFIND-572 - This has been resolved: you can now turn a basic search into an advanced search by simply clicking the “Advanced” link from the basic results screen – this causes the advanced search form to be appropriately pre-populated from the existing basic search.
  • VUFIND-942 - This old ticket about VuFind's .gitignore file has been closed, as there has been no discussion of the subject in quite some time. A few obvious additions to the file were made.
  • VUFIND-1131 - This feature request for a “select all” button on checked out items has been resolved.
  • VUFIND-1135 - This ticket is a reminder to investigate adding support for Solr DateRange fields at some point (captured from Summit discussion).
  • VUFIND-1136 - This ticket is a request for caching of proxied cover images; the functionality has been implemented.
  • VUFIND-1137 - This ticket requests a configuration/pattern-based method for retrieving images from disk in the cover loader. Feel free to suggest use cases/config syntax on the ticket.
  • VUFIND-1138 - This ticket addressed a Javascript bug in the master code (not affecting any released versions); it has been fixed.
  • VUFIND-1139 - Demian hopes to address the legacy issue of items from the 'Solr' search backend being stored in the database with a source of 'VuFind'. This ticket will track progress on that task – a large job, but one that will eliminate one of the more unnecessarily confusing aspects of VuFind's design (and some nasty special-case code).

Pull Requests

  • #507, #514 - merged - Cover driver for Buchhandel.de (needs some template work for terms of service compliance – currently noted in configuration, but we should also begin work on more robust native cover attribution support).
  • #508 - merged - Improved Apache configuration for directory-based multi-site.
  • #509, #512, #513, #517 - merged - Translation/language file adjustments
  • #510 - merged - Support for a new optional “ajaxTabs” setting that makes all tabs (even initial one) load by AJAX.
  • #511 - closed - This ticket was moved to the VuFindHttp repository.
  • #515 - merged - Adds some keyboard shortcuts for navigating result sets.
  • #516 - merged - IE bug fix for advanced searches.
  • #518 - merged - Bug fix to advanced search permission check.
  • #519 - merged - Bug fix to deduplication listener.
  • #520 - merged - Minor style tweak.
  • #521 - in progress - Work/discussion on more granular availability status messages from the ILS driver.
  • #522 - merged - Minor optimization.
  • #523 - merged - Bug fix to cloning of search objects.
  • #524 - merged - Bug fix to Primo backend (does not affect any released versions).
  • #525, #528 - in progress - “Delimited facet” capability for differentiating between different versions of a string which share the same display value (i.e. by appending an ID that is used for filtering but not for display).
  • #526 - merged - Support for specifying a custom alphabrowse folder in the indexing script (via SOLR_HOME variable).
  • #527 - merged - Minor Aleph driver fix.
  • #529 - merged - Travis configuration tweak (turn off xdebug for faster builds)
  • #530 - merged - Filter empty lines out of the parsed table of contents in the SolrMarc record driver.
  • #531 - merged - Progress on translations for improved_author_indexing branch.
  • #532 - merged - Allow Shibboleth authentication plugin to save a cat_username even if cat_password is empty (same change also made later to CAS and LDAP handlers). This allows usernames to be saved even for ILSes that do not require passwords.
  • #533 - merged - Improvements to the new autocomplete functionality.
  • #534 - in progress - Work on VUFIND-1139 ('VuFind' vs. 'Solr' source value in database).
  • VuFindHttp#4 - in progress - A proposed change to the default HTTP adapter; needs further discussion (may be closed without action).

2. Development Planning

Improved Author Indexing

Translation progress has been made, a few more strings will be coming early next year (but require expert advice). André will adjust comments and reorganize file.

Only other outstanding issue: author initials. We can probably deal with that as a second pass after merging this PR.

Revised Dependency Management

No further work seems to be necessary in this area. We simply need to decide when to merge PR #501 to master.

We'll wait until next call to discuss this so that Guenter and others have time to test further.

Solr Upgrade

Demian has continued investigating docValues and ran into a problem: docValues are not supported for TextFields, but many of VuFind's facet fields use TextField instead of StrField to allow regular expression processing to strip trailing punctuation. He also noticed a TextFacetRaw field type that can probably be removed from the schema, as it is essentially the same as a StrField.

Demian will change TextFacetRaw to StrField in the near future.

Ere is in favor of changing the processing to the indexer side, but he does not use SolrMarc, etc. André mentioned not having capacity to work on Solr upgrade until next year – more comments there. Guenter will look into docValues/TextFields issue now.

Solr 5.4 is coming soon – we'll see if that changes anything.

Javascript Reorganization

Chris has merged quite a few changes to master. If you have custom Javascript in your theme, it may require adjustments.

Cover Issues

Discussion of limitations/advantages of current cover system. Can we include extra information in image HTTP headers? Do we need an AJAX API that triggers on load of image to retrieve additional information?

Demian will do research on possibility of HTTP header-based solution (seems very unlikely to work, especially when introducing browser caching – but worth a quick look). Volunteers needed for AJAX-based solution; Demian will open a JIRA ticket to track progress.

3. VuFind 3 Roadmapping

API progress

Guenter's colleague Markus plans to begin work on a search API to meet local needs (built on ZF3).

Ere mentioned that more work has been done on simple API for search/record retrieval (currently specific to National Library of Finland's index structure, but could be made more generic). Relevant code: https://github.com/NatLibFi/NDL-VuFind2/blob/master/module/Finna/src/Finna/Controller/SearchApiController.php, https://github.com/NatLibFi/NDL-VuFind2/blob/master/module/Finna/src/Finna/Controller/FinnaApiTrait.php.

Modularization progress

Demian may try to prioritize cover generator work to get all functionality implemented prior to a possible reorganization.

No news on ILS driver reorganization yet.

Improved Use of Permissions

No news.

4. VuFind Non-Profit Organization

Discussions have recently been renewed a Villanova about the possibility of creating a non-profit organization to help sustain the VuFind project. This would be useful, among other things, for answering the periodic question of “what do we do with money that gets donated to the project?”

We're interested in feedback/suggestions.

Nothing will go forward without review by the community, and the intent here is to facilitate project growth rather than to make any shocking changes.

5. Wiki Reorganization

Demian has upgraded the wiki to a newer version, adding some new plugins to allow pages to be moved (with old URLs forwarding to new ones). This will allow some significant reorganization in the near future. Demian hopes to remove the current “VuFind 1 vs. VuFind 2” emphasis of the wiki in favor of a “latest documentation vs. legacy notes” approach. He also hopes to use the Wiki's namespacing to create more useful breadcrumb trails to all content, perhaps using a new hierarchy based around Installation/Configuration/Indexing/Development/Administration (though alternate category suggestions are welcome). Suggestions on reorganization and volunteers to help with the process of updating/moving pages would be welcomed.

6. Next Call Date?

We discussed whether to skip the next scheduled call (December 22) due to its proximity to the Christmas holiday. Due to limited expected attendance, we decided to defer until January 5, 2016.

7. Other Topics?

Update on Foundation 5 theme: feature branch will soon be updated with current Javascript changes. Should be finished by Christmas. Demian offered to provide support as needed on questions about JS changes and/or integration testing.

Next Call

The next call will be Tuesday, January 5, 2016 at 9am Eastern Standard Time (14:00 GMT).

developers_call/minutes20151208.txt · Last modified: 2015/12/08 14:57 by demiankatz