Evergreen 3.0 development update #14: results of the second Feedback Fest


Display at the circulation desk of the Lucius Beebe Memorial Library in Wakefield, MA. Photo courtesy Jeff Klapes.

Since the previous update, another 61 patches have made their way into Evergreen’s master branch. Last week was the second Feedback Fest for the 3.0 release cycle, so let’s talk about some numbers.

A total of 52 bugs either had a pull request when the Feedback Fest started or got one during the course of the week. Of those, 23 resulted in patches getting merged. Some merges of particular note include:

  • A new database view for more efficiently retrieving lists of current and aged loans (bug 1695007)
  • Teaching Evergreen about the time zone that a library belongs to to help format due date and due displays (bug 1705524)
  • Teaching the web staff client how to print spine and item labels (bug 1704873)
  • Adding two more popularity metrics (bug 1688096)
  • Several improvements to Evergreen’s SIP server
  • Numerous fixes to the the internationalization infrastructure; the net effect is that more strings are available to translators

The fix for bug 1480432 warrants a particular shout-out, as it clarifies a subtle detail of the staff permissions system. It’s possible for a staff member to receive a given permission at more than one depth. For example, a staff member could have VIEW_USER permission at the branch level because of their primary profile, but could also have it at system level because of a secondary permission group. Prior to the bugfix, the actual depth that was applied would depend on hidden details of exactly when and how the permission was granted. As a result of the bugfix, there’s now a clear rule: if a staff account is granted a given permission multiple times, the depth applied is the one that grants the permission as broadly as possible. Many thanks to Michele Morgan for the bugfix and to Cesar Velez for writing unit tests.

Back to the numbers: three of the feedback fest bugs were tested and signed off, but not yet merged. Four of them got a pull request during the fest, while nine received comments of various sorts. In total, 75% of the feedback fest bugs received substantive feedback, which matches the results of the first Feedback Fest.

I would like to thank the following people who participated in Feedback Fest #2:

  • Galen Charlton
  • Jeff Davis
  • Bill Erickson
  • Jason Etheridge
  • Rogan Hamby
  • Blake Henderson
  • Kyle Huckins
  • Kathy Lussier
  • Terran McCanna
  • Michele Morgan
  • Andrea Neiman
  • Dan Pearl
  • Mike Rylander
  • Dan Scott
  • Chris Sharp
  • Ben Shum
  • Cesar Velez

It should be noted that several people also reported or commented on bugs that didn’t have a pull request.

As a reminder, the deadline for feature slush is this Friday, 18 August. Feature slush means that new features meant for inclusion in 3.0 should have a pull request on their bugs by end of business on the 18th (although as release manager and as somebody who hopes to be viewing the solar eclipse on the 21st, there is some wiggle room with that deadline). There will not be similar wiggle room for the feature freeze deadline of 1 September.

There are some large pull requests awaiting review, including the web staff serials module and the copy alert and suppression matrix, so please keep testing, y’all!

Duck trivia

Ducks can help streamline work at the circulation desk. The image in today’s post is courtesy of Jeff Klapes of the Lucius Beebe Memorial Library in Wakefield, MA, who says, “We have a monthly duck display at our circulation desk to divert the attention of the little ones while their parents check things out. It’s been wildly successful.”

Submissions

Updates on the progress to Evergreen 3.0 will be published every Friday until general release of 3.0.0. If you have material to contribute to the updates, please get them to Galen Charlton by Thursday morning.