The State / Stats of Evergreen development: 2011-2012

Posted on Mon 30 April 2012 in Libraries

On Thursday, April 26, I was part of The State of Evergreen talk, organized by Grace Dunbar, that also included sections by the dynamic combo of Kathy Lussier, Ben Hyman, and Tara Robertson. We opened the Evergreen 2012 conference and lead into the day's featured keynote speaker Mr. Jono Bacon (who, by the way, gave a good talk about community at an important time in Evergreen's growth).

My assigned mission was, with a time limit of 5 minutes, to give the audience an update on the progress in Evergreen development since the 2011 conference. Naturally, I turned to gource to generate a visualization of the changes committed to the Evergreen git repository since April 2011.

With the visualization running in the background, I ran over the following numbers (statistics is probably too strong of a word) with the audience...

Let’s go with *Stats of Evergreen development*

Code contributors

Over the past year, we have seen:

  • 2209 commits from a total of 29 different authors (8 active core committers)

  • 9 contributors outside of the core committer group with 5 or more commits:

    • Jason Stephenson - 48

    • Michael Peters - 26

    • Scott Prater - 20

    • Joseph Lewis - 19

    • James Fournie - 16

    • Robin Isard - 12

    • Liam Whalen - 6

    • Ben Shum - 6

    • Steven Callender - 5

  • One female contributor - Sarah Chodrow (More, please!)

Source code visualization

Features

  • Autosuggest for searches
  • TPAC - a sane, fast, functional catalogue - Print & email & SMS record details - Opt-in circulation & hold history
  • Authentication proxy - with example support for LDAP authentication in JSPAC
  • Custom library hierarchies, library visibility, and copy location groups
  • Staff client enhancements: secondary sorting columns, row numbers, double-clickery, configurable toolbars
  • Patron statistical categories: defaults, freetext control, required-ness
  • Acquisitions, MARC Batch Import/Export, and serials UI enhancements
  • Circulation limits

Policies and procedures

  • Master is always stable

    • To avoid time-wasting regressions, every commit must be reviewed

      and tested by a second developer

  • Timed releases - for predictability

    • One major release every six months, starting with 2.2.0

    • Patch releases - no timed policy as of yet

  • Community support policy

    • Each major release gets 12 months of full support, followed by 3

      months of security patches

    • Therefore, sites should plan on one major upgrade per year

  • Database upgrade script sanity

Communication

Documentation

Since last year:

  • 12 meetings

  • 200 commits, covering 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2

  • Conversion from DocBook to AsciiDoc

  • Single sourcing install documentation and release notes

Kudos to:

  • Karen Collier for direction and organization

  • Robert Soulliere for tirelessly formatting and publishing

  • Yamil Suarez for picking up the torch from Karen

  • Many other members of the Documentation Interest Group (DIG)

Releases

  • 2.0 series

  • April 2011 - 2.0.5

  • May 2011 - 2.0.6

  • June 2011 - 2.0.7

  • August 2011 - 2.0.8, 2.0.9

  • October 2011 - 2.0.10, 2.0.10a

  • 2.1 series

    • October 2011 - 2.1.0, 2.1.0a

    • November 2011 - 2.1.1

  • 2.2 series

    • November 2011 - 2.2 alpha1

    • March 2012 - 2.2 alpha2, 2.2 alpha3

    • April 2012 - 2.2 beta1, 2.2 beta2

Evergreen