use Perl

It seems like things are running in pairs today.

• First, I find that four new webservers that I set up yesterday have all fallen down due to a two separate mis-features in the configuration management tool we use here at work.
• Then I got a pair of emails from people working on Koha in Germany describing a new surge in interest over there. (I've actually seen the background for these emails on the german language Koha mailing list, but my german is so bad that I only got a vague feel for things before they let me know.)

It kind of makes me wonder what's in store for me at tonight's seattle.rb meeting. Maybe we'll get twice as much hacking done. ;^)

OB Perl note: I'm going to end up rewriting some existing scripts at work. Looking over the code really makes me grateful for mjd's fine work on the program repair shop articles. Thanks!

Oh, yeah, there are a couple more Koha bits that I should probably mention.

• Koha's development tree is at 1.3.3, and 1.9.0 is right around the corner
• Koha's stable tree is at 1.2.3RC24 and 1.2.3 is right around the corner
• a danish translation is on the books
• a couple of people have mentioned translating Koha to Breton.

So many threads to follow and so little time,
-pate

Okay, koha is getting close to a 2.0 release (maybe in February according to the 2.0 release manager), and we need to start looking to the future. One of the things we really want to focus on for the next release is a major rewrite/refactor.

To really make this work, we're going to need to get a lot better at testing. I think there are two keys to this. First, I'd like to recruit someone to work as the testing manager. (I need to come up with a better title than 'manager' -- I'm afraid it scares people off.) Second, I'd love to find a couple more developers with some solid testing background, who are willing to volunteer their time on a cool FOSS project.

If you match the above descriptions, and are interested in volunteering, please feel free to drop me a note at kaitiaki@koha.org.

thanks,
-pate

Wow, the Koha project (a free software project developing an Integrated Library System -- see www.koha.org) has really been hitting its stride of late.

Last night was a good example. Several things popped up:

• Two new developers popped up asking where they could contribute
• The tranlsation of the project into spanish got jumpstarted, and should be showing up in the main cvs tree soon
• The development tree for Koha 2.0 hit 1.3.2
• People have started to jell around a new interface to the catalog that we've been talking about.

I'm looking forward to the next several days!