[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] Test server for 2.1 (was: DIG Meeting Follow-up)

[Soulliere, Robert]

Hi Dan,

You summarized the intended purpose quite well. The main idea is to have a test server of the upcoming release so documentation authors could begin testing new features in practice before the official release of the version, thus reducing the time gap between release of the code and release of the official documentation. Hopefully, at some point we can release a good portion of the documentation at the same time as the code.

The parts of the documentation to most benefit from this test server would be some of the staff client tasks and especially in regards to new features and work flows around those features.

That being said, I guess the question should be brought up about whether this test server is a need in reality or only theory. In other words, if their is a test server for upcoming releases, will folks actually use it. Many of us have our own test environments and can set up test servers with future releases, but the hope was that this gives a greater number of folks access to a test environment for the future releases to help improve the documentation and get new documentation more quickly to the community.

We might have a way to gauge usage of a community Evergreen  test server since Brian Feifarek generously to set up a test server for 2.0 months ago.

It is publicized ion the DIG page (and other places):
http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-docs:dig

and it has been brought up at a past DIG and community meetings in the past.

This was set up at the release candidate stage of 2.0 development. I wonder if we could get some statistics on usage or traffic for this server since it has been running for quite a while?

Those number might give us an idea about whether this is a need at all at this time.

Perhaps people could chime in as well to indicate if such a test server is useful or not -- we could extend that question to the general lists? Silence could tell us a lot.

I don't think a route involving financial costs would be possible since DIG does not have a budget. Of course, a free server would be "free" as in kittens and not "free" as in beer since there are resource and time costs associated with a documentation test server which is why we need to verify if it is truly a need.

In short, would demand justify the costs?


Thanks,
Robert


Robert Soulliere, BA (Hons), MLIS
Systems Librarian
Mohawk College Library
robert.soulliere at mohawkcollege.ca
Telephone: 905 575 1212 x3936
Fax: 905 575 2011
________________________________________
From: open-ils-documentation-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org [open-ils-documentation-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Dan Scott [dan at coffeecode.net]
Sent: September 2, 2011 12:55 AM
To: Documentation discussion for Evergreen software
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] Test server for 2.1 (was: DIG Meeting Follow-up)

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 12:15:47PM -0700, Lori Bowen Ayre wrote:
> HI All,
>
> Regarding a test server.  We've been trying to provide a test server
> environment with Brian's efforts.  Currently, I guess it is really more of a
> demo server but without too much effort, we could probably set up 2.1
> instances for libraries to use for their own testing.  Brian has the servers
> on the Amazon cloud so we could build VM instances there.
>
> We'd probably have to charge a fee to set up a dedicated image of 2.1 that a
> library could use for a period of time.  Brian could be available to reset
> it if someone wanted to start all over as part of their testing and he could
> provide some limited tech support.  But the concept would be, your library
> could have access to their own system so you could load data and test
> settings without having to worry that another person would come in and undo
> everything you set up.
>
> Is this of interest?  And if so, how do you see DIG being involved?  And
> also, what could libraries pay (e.g. per month) for having us set this up
> and maintain it for them....$500/month?

A VPS at Linode and many other sites with 1.5 GB of RAM - enough to load
a reasonable amount of data on for testing purposes - is about $60 /
month. Before we even go that route, though, community members have been
pretty generous in the past about making VMs available for various
purposes (PINES with the Web server and various other machines, Mohawk
with the doc server, Equinox with the testing and git servers, etc).
Maybe step one would be to ask the broader community who (if anyone)
would be willing to make a 2.1 server available.

I believe the purpose of the system would be to test and document
procedures to ensure that the documentation is sound - is that what you
had in mind, Robert and Yamil? It sounds like what Lori has in mind
would be something set up & reserved for specific libraries, which is a
bit of a different beast.

Ben Webb, as part of his Google Summer of Code project, had made
significant progress on automating Evergreen installs. So we'd be
looking at getting a 2.1 server set up, and running a single command to
reload a clean set of data whenever needed (this, too, could be
automated). It would be awesome to have a consistent set of data to
support documented task flows so we could ensure that the outcomes are
what we expect, but baby steps...

Aside: this would be a good topic for our next community meeting, which
we should probably try and schedule...
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