Thursday, July 30, 2015

Evergreen 2.9-alpha Release Postponed

As release manage for the Evergreen 2.9 release, I decided to postpone yesterday's planned alpha release pending some resolution of two new Launchpad bugs:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1479107

https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1479110

Both of these affect the conditional negative balances features, and I thought it better to wait for some progress on those fronts rather than releasing something that will change quite a bit in behavior in a few weeks.

Furthermore, the release notes for the conditional negative balance feature have not been rolled out, yet, as those notes also depend upon what happens with the above two bugs.

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Evergreen 2.9 RM Update: Goodbye Scripted Circ and Hold Rules

This update is to inform everyone that your humble Evergreen 2.9 release manager has pushed Bill Erickson's code branch to remove JavaScript circulation and hold rules in preparation for the 2.9 alpha release later this month. This means that if your site currently uses the JavaScript circulation and hold rules, you must switch to in-database circulation and hold parameters when you upgrade to Evergreen 2.9.

The plans to eliminate the JavaScript circulation and hold rules have been in the works for some time. It was decided at the March 12, 2013 Evergreen developers' meeting to deprecate the feature in the upcoming 2.4 release and to tear it out by the 2.6 release. Unfortunately, this announcement did not make it into the release notes for 2.4.

A Launchpad bug was created in April of 2014 to track progress of this effort, and it was added as a goal to the 2.7 release roadmap. Removal of such a large feature takes time, and so the 2.7 and 2.8 releases came and went before the efforts were finally realized earlier this year. In keeping with the goals for the 2.9 release, I have tested and pushed this branch.

Many thanks go to Bill Erickson and to the others who have worked on this project. The elimination of JavaScript circulation and hold rules also removes several prerequisite modules from the Evergreen installation process. This lightens the load and makes Evergreen easier to install.