It’s been about 4 weeks since I wrote an entry. In the meantime we’ve been tidying up the last of the To Do list items for the upcoming GS2 release and several of the To Do list items for the GS3 release. Sam is now hard working on the GS3 interface alongside his other work on the Document Maker. It now looks like GS3 may be released separately, after GS2.

Some of the more involved things that required doing were:

• testing OAI (dc.Resource Identifier issues) and downloading over OAI
• The extracted embedded metadata, ex.*.metadata (e.g. ex.dc.* prefixes), needed to be handled different from ex.metadata. This required some changes in various files and a lot of testing.
• Conflicts between EmbeddedMetadataPlugin and some of the existing Plugins in the pipeline (OAI, DSpace, PDF plugins). Fortunately, Dr Bainbridge came up with fixes. After some testing, the known problems with these plugins no longer exist. With the tutorials we will continue to investigate how well other plugins interact with the EmbeddedMetaPlugin.
• The OAI validator at openarchives now had a test where GS2’s OAI server failed and a different one where the GS3 OAI server failed. These have been fixed up.
• The GS3 installer needed to have an admin page, like the GS2 installer does, where the user can enable admin pages and provide a password.
• wvware.pl is a new intermediary script to launch wvware in its own particular environment. This script is necessary in order for wvware’s required environment not to be set globally (thereby tampering with Linux’ windowing/GUI libraries)
• At the moment, after John Rose’s request, we’re in the process of merging the two server configuration files (glisite.cfg and llssite.cfg), so we can have just one, with some properties qualified by a “gli” prefix. The Server.jar code, the GS2 C++ code, the startup scripts and config files have been sufficiently modified to work with the work-in-progress on the GLI code, while still working with the stable GLI. Changing the GLI code was tricky two years ago, and made the code’s behaviour rather  complex. Now that I’m in the process of testing the latest overhaul to it, the changes I’ve just made to what was stable are still very buggy and reproducing the bugs takes some time. Fortunately, without the changes to the GLI code, everything else committed is able to work as accurately as before, which is fortunate since if I break anything, it will be just the LocalLibraryServer.java GLI code that once committed needs to be reverted.
• The above task has now been completely resolved, and changes committed after being tested thoroughly on both Windows and Linux.

Minor issues also kept popping up over the last month.

• There was a Z3950 “issue”that sidetracked me and which turned out not to be an issue after all: The Library of Congress’ Z3950 address seems to return SRU data. The fix is simply for the user to use the right module of the download pane.
• A bug in starting and stopping GS3 via GLI on windows
• One Greenstone member encountered a unicode issue that I wasn’t able to reproduce after initial investigations.
• Minor but frustrating bugs with the GLI for GS3 have been resolved (an extra nested <format/> tag appearing when all format statements have been removed, and the preview button activating itself when editing format statements in an unbuilt GS3 collection)
• Fixed GS3’s way of handling the port in the GSI application, so that it is no longer arbitrarily modified. The Do Not Modify port is still available.
• Some requests on the mailing list like porting indexed databases from one GS2 version to the next, since changes had been made to the name of an ex.metadata

Categories: Greenstone2, Greenstone3, Releases