[Koha-devel] Zebra and Directory Structures

[Joshua Ferraro]

Hey guys,

I'd like to propose that we reflect for a bit about how to structure the
zebra components within rel_3_0 before we diverge too much. 

There are currently three zebra databases for a given rel_3_0 install, 
and it's likely there will be more in the future (if we have a metarecord
bibliographic for instance), but for now we have:

  biblios (biblio records)
  authorities (authorities records )
  public (for a publicly accessible Z39.50)

Each of these needs its own 'tab' directory, as well as registry
locations, etc (for the database files).

We also have at least two MARC types to deal with, with more to follow
if our plans for world domination succeed :-): usmarc and unimarc.
Each flavor of MARC needs it's own tab files.

I propose we create a standard for managing the zebra files as follows.
The installer creates one directory 'zebra' with the following contents:

$ ls zebra/
unimarc usmarc

then, in each of these we'll have:

$ ls zebra/usmarc/
authorities biblios public

within each of these we'll have in turn:
$ ls zebra/usmarc/biblios/
key  lock  recordDelete  register  shadow  specialUpdate  tab  tmp

This way, if I have one server with three disks, I can have the
following distribution:

Filesystem      Mounted on
/dev/sda1       /
/dev/sda2       /koha/zebra/usmarc/biblios
/dev/sda3       /koha/zebra/usmarc/authorities

(ie, in this way, zebra biblios, authorities and mysql don't compete
for disk usage).

I also propose we attempt to keep unimarc and usmarc in as close sync as
possible, using the same naming conventions, etc., to make sure we
don't get confused. (I noticed that in the unimarc directory, there
are directories with capital letters as the first letter of the dir ...
which is different than in usmarc ... we should pick one method and
stick with it )

All of the non-tab files (like koha.xml, ccl.properties, pqf.properties,
zebra-biblios.cfg, zebra-authorities.cfg, zebra-public.cfg should IMO
go into the koha etc directory, but in CVS we should have:

misc/etc/usmarc/
misc/etc/unimarc/

because the files are different for each flavor of MARC. Or should we
store these config files in the tab dir?

Finally, once we decide on a method, lets clean up CVS by deleting all
the extra directories and files (like zebraplugin and misc/zebra).

Comments, suggestions?

-- 
Joshua Ferraro                       SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
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