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developers_call:minutes20170314

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VuFind Developers Call Minutes: March 14, 2017

Attending: Leila Gonzales, Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Ere Maijala, Benjamin Mosior, Brad Patton

Agenda

1. Development Updates

JIRA Tickets

  • VUFIND-1223 - This reports a bug in next/prev navigation which was fixed in release 3.1.3.
  • VUFIND-1224 - This reports a limitation of the solr.sh startup script.

Pull Requests

  • #934 - in progress - Adds test records for experimenting with VuFind's hierarchical collection feature; tests using these records still need to be developed.
  • #935, #938 - merged - Minor Voyager / VoyagerRestful ILS driver improvements.
  • #936 - in progress - Updates to the latest Zend\EventManager version.
  • #937 - merged - Minor Sierra ILS driver improvement.
  • #939 - in progress - A solution to VUFIND-1224 (a new environment variable to allow arbitrary parameters to be passed through to the Solr startup script).

Release 3.1.3

VuFind 3.1.3 went out on time, as planned.

Demian had some trouble getting Ubuntu 16.10 working on VirtualBox, so he hasn't tested the new release on that version yet; Ben suggested trying Vagrant. Demian will investigate when time permits.

2. Development Planning

VuFind on Heroku

Ben added some commits to cover the install.php changes we discussed; he added a “platform” flag to keep things fairly generic. Setting platform to Heroku now enables some adjustments to Apache configuration generation.

Up next: automatic database provisioning; investigating Solr support (possibly limited by existing Solr support at version 4 on the platform)

Question: what is the minimum amount of value for this feature that is releasable? Probably “push button, get database and Solr instance.” Solr piece may be negotiable for first round – some users might be interested in Summon (or other API) wrapper.

Some discussion about whether to switch to long tags in templates for better standards compliance. Demian will see if php-cs-fixer can convert short tags to long tags and if so will open a PR so we can compare.

Image Metadata API Revisited

Leila is still investigating.

Breaking Up Templates

#892 is still in progress; a few more pieces still need to be broken out to smaller templates.

Channels

#693 has likely reached its final form; it simply awaits test-writing and documentation before being merged.

Modularization

No news.

Next ZF Version

Significant progress has been made here. Demian has gotten in touch with the Zend development team and learned that slow progress on components was due to energy being invested into Zend Expressive 2.0; now that that work is nearly done, the log jam should break up on other things. Demian has invested some of his own time in updating the ZendService_Amazon component in order to allow entangled Zend\Crypt dependencies to be updated properly – this work allows the completion of #895.

Improved Use of Permissions

No news.

Solr 6

Solr 6.4.2 has been released, which supposedly fixes the SOLR-10130 performance issues. Demian has updated #869 so we can resume testing. Please share feedback if you have time to try this out.

Ere has done a little bit of experimentation with Solr 6.4.2 – so far, so good, but more extensive performance testing is needed. (Still running patched 6.4.1 in production at the moment).

Deprecation Progress

No news.

Other Front End Updates

New Theme?

Chris is looking at some new technologies for inspiration (though he doesn't plan to make dramatic changes to the core themes at this stage). Better customization options are a goal. If you have strong opinions on how any particular elements (buttons, inputs, etc.) should be styled, please send suggestions to Chris – he will be working on visually differentiating VuFind from Bootstrap defaults.

3. VuFind Usage Survey

The survey is officially closed. Chris still needs to go through the detailed text answers. Chris thanks everyone from participating – we got more responses than anticipated.

Some interesting initial findings:

1. The largest chunk of users are on 2.x, followed by 3.1

2. Nearly half of users are running multiple instances

3. 95% of users are running MySQL; the rest are on PostgreSQL

4. The largest chunk of ILS usage goes to NoILS (20% use no ILS!)

5. Piwik is much more popular than Google Analytics (though “no analytics” is least popular)

6. Most people install via GitHub; some users have scripted automated deployment tools

A more detailed summary will be provided on the next call.

4. Institutional Home

No news.

5. Next Call Date

Demian and Chris will be unavailable on the next scheduled call date (March 28); Demian will also be unavailable for the following scheduled date (April 11), but Chris has agreed to run the meeting.

6. Other Topics?

None this time.

Next Call

The next call will be Tuesday, April 11, 2017 at 9am Eastern Daylight Time (13:00 GMT).

developers_call/minutes20170314.1489498118.txt.gz · Last modified: 2017/03/14 13:28 by demiankatz