This afternoon, rather quietly, I posted the first release candidate for Evergreen 1.2.0 on the Open-ILS.org download page. This is a big milestone for the project and for the developers. It’s also a big milestone for those interested in adopting Evergreen outside of PINES. The 1.0 series was pretty heavily skinned for PINES, with the images, rules, and default configuration, and new backend features were slow to be incorporated due to the pain of updating the database schema. The shiny new 1.2 series removes almost all traces of PINES-specific images and default rules, and contains many new backend improvements. It is also the first non-experimental release to include a significant amount of code not created directly by GPLS and PINES.
Pile o’ stuff
Wow. It’s been a crazy two months. We’ve been going strong, if silent, and overall things have been going swimmingly. Some highlights:
- The mailing lists finally got busy (yay!), and to help sort through some of our growing pains we put together a document to help early adopters and contributors to get their feet wet
- Brought on a new system, South Georgia Regional, during the first half of December and they’ve been humming right along
- Added snazzy new back-end storage and search functionality which should allow all sorts of new data access patterns
- Brought on another new system, Thomas County Public, on February 1st while I (miker) was at…
- …the Ontario Library Association’s Super Conference talking about metadata normalization and how generally and specifically we can use said to increase the utility of the OPAC for our patrons
- Bill headed up north to Rochester, NY, to attend the XC (eXtensable Catalog) partners meeting — for which I am very jealous, as he got to meet the (in)famous Roy Tennent
- And, last but not least, we managed to squeeze Evergreen version 1.0.2 out the door. You can expect more frequent release in the near term, and we are currently targeting sometime this spring for 1.2.0
All in all, we really should have filled up several pages here, so … sorry. 🙂 Perhaps some more detail will come soon…
Output goings on
We finally broke down and created a Freshmeat project — well, Brad did. I’ve added the 1.0.1 release (also available here), and it’s waiting approval by the fine folks over at FM.
As I mentioned before in passing, we’re trying to be better about these sorts of things. We’ll continue to announce releases here and do our best to keep the FM page up to date as well. You can expect new release bundles fairly often, if irregularly, and we’re committed to not breaking compatibility inside any major release series — so 1.0.2 (whenever that happens) will simply replace 1.0.1 directly, with no specialized upgrade script required.
Now that we’re numbering releases we’ll also try to pull together some “official” documentation on what the version numbers mean, but for now it’s safe to think of it like the Linux kernel: 0 and even numbered minor version numbers (x.[02468].x) are stable, and odds are development/experimental/unstable.
That’s all for now … but stay tuned!