Caveat Lector

So I say I’m going to start a series, and not another post since then. Go me.

Anyway, a lot has been happening on dspace-devel, some of which has spilled over onto dspace-tech and even dspace-general. The biggest news is that we probably can’t expect to see DSpace 1.4 until March at the earliest (and personally, given the scope of what’s in progress, I wouldn’t place a large bet on seeing it in March).

What’s the holdup? Well, active discussions have been had (and are still being had) about making DSpace modular, and offering a standard way to create, describe, and integrate plugins. This is not a simple hack, not at all—it has major implications for DSpace’s future development, such that getting it wrong would be a tremendous problem. So the developers are trying extra hard to think it through and get it right.

For those technically inclined, the current stumbling block appears to be coping with all the myriad little config files that will come with plugins—everything from Messages.properties to actual database schema changes. Thoughts range from homegrown merge tools to entire IDEs.

Other things popping up with frequency in the patch pipeline include a commenting add-on, a lovely hack that will allow much more flexibility in defining submission workflows, an on-the-fly interface internationalization patch (coming from Canada, I believe, quelle surprise), a controlled-vocabulary patch, a search-improvement patch (unlimited search arguments; the limit is currently 3), and a “community administrator” patch that should help delegate work better.