[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Loan Periods and Fines (was Re: Question for consortiums)

[Jason Etheridge]

> That's not exactly what I like to hear. It should be configurable in the
> database. I'll need to do some investigation on my own.

At a certain point it's a trade-off between ease of use and
flexibility.  In 1.4, the most common cases are all
handled/configurable in the database, but we still allow the use of
user-scripted behavior as a fall-through/escape hatch for exceptional
behavior.

What I hope we don't end up seeing is runaway "soft coding" where we
introduce more complexity than we remove, all in the name of
abstraction and end-user configurability.  Scripts are easier to diff
and put under version control than a multi-dimensional pure-data
matrix that can grow a dimension every time we think of something new.

As it is now, very few Evergreen libraries make use of the end-user
knobs and dials already available to them, such as the copy-level Loan
Duration and Fine Level switches, and the temptation is there to use
Circ Modifiers as legacy item types instead of relying on item
templates to hide the complexity but retain the control.

-- 
Jason Etheridge
 | VP, Community Support and Advocacy
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  jason at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com