[librecat-dev] Happy New Year

[Patrick Hochstenbach]

Hello all,

Best wishes for all of you in 2023. I see we have this year our 10 year anniversary of publishing open source code for libraries together. Doing all our ELAG and SWIB meeting we managed to publish 131 repositories at https://github.com/LibreCat. There are few library projects that can repeat that feat. I hope we will meet each other soon again in live conferences. I’ve very much enjoyed SWIB and ELAG the last 2 years, but it is still much better with a discussion and a beer and some unhealthy food.

I’ve talked with the group in Bielefeld and Ghent and we would like to have a fresh start of the year by making some things clearer on the website and keep it focused on the cooperation we had over the last year: enjoying to share code and keeping away from selling products and marketing the tools we provided as-is.

The first plan is to make a slimmed down version of the current website https://librecat.org and focus more on the github project https://github.com/LibreCat we already have. This would make it much easier to maintain this website and focus on the tooling we all have a shared interest in (mainly Catmandu I assume).

Here is a proposal for a smaller website: https://github.com/LibreCat/librecat.github.io/tree/pr/smaller

It is just the old homepage without the LibreCat catalog, and listing of dozens of modules (of which many are quite old).

TODO: could some of you check if this new website is okay for you?

About all these Perl modules ..I really see a wide variety of activity level:


  *   17 modules have had a release since 2020
  *   More than 70 modules have not been touched in the last 3 years
  *   9 core developers for all these tools

I think we need to provide some hints maybe in those modules which are deprecated or even not working anymore. To give an idea which of those can better be moved into the CPAN archive (backpan that is?).

Also for Catmandu itself we were contemplating to focus more on the command line capabilities of the code than in the Perl API (this latter one is hard to maintain). Catmandu is moving in our institute more into this command line processing direction. For library specific modules Catmandu is and will be very effective. But maintaining Perl APIs to talk to Solr, Mongo, Elastic, Couch etc etc is very time consuming and probably other tools exist that can better be used for these not-library specific tasks.

What are your thoughts about this:


  *   Do you use the command line interface?
  *   Do you use the Catmandu.pm Perl libraries inside your code? Do you write Perl code that requires Catmandu?
  *   What are the main Catmandu extension modules you use (Catmandu::MARC, Catmandu::DBI, Catmandu::RDF, …)
  *   Do you use Catmandu to store or query data in databases or search engines?



Feedback is very welcome!



Hopefully, we meet each other again soon.



Patrick

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