Re: [Koha-devel] Bug reporting by amateurs

[Roger Horne]

On Wed 22 Aug, Owen Leonard wrote:
> 
> > So how should someone who is not sure what he is doing report this sort of 
> > possible (partial) start of a solution to a known problem? 
> 
> Most bug reports on Bugzilla (http://bugs.koha.org) aren't as detailed as
> what you've written here. There isn't any reason why "amateurs" shouldn't
> be posting bugs to Bugzilla as long as they can provide the necessary
> information about their system configuration, error log, and steps to
> repeat the problem. That's what Bugzilla is for!

I still have to discover how Bugzilla works. I note that there is another
"new" report about z3950 problems but I cannot see how to read it so I am
not sure if it is the same problem. (No. 1389 assigned to Paul.Poulain).
There may be others on the same subject, so I thought it best to post here.

I mentioned a week or so ago on one of the Koha lists about the z3950 search
failing for me, and others have reported the same thing. The log contains the
usual errors about headers etc and the program asks if I want to save
search.pl. 

Yet it seemed to work for others. MJ Ray was trying to find the
problem.

I think that I may have discovered the bug, although not necessarily the
cure.

z3950/search.pl contains the lines
 
# warn ("server data",$server->{name}, $server->{port});
$oConnection[$s]->connect($server->{host}, $server->{port}) 
  || warn ("something went wrong: ".$oConnection[$s]->errmsg());

I uncommented and changed the warning to read:
 warn ("server data: ",$server->{name}, $server->{port}, $server{host});

and the response was z3950.loc.gov, 7090, Library of Congress

So in my case the script was sending Library of Congress:7090 into the
ether. And it naturally failed.

The reason is that I used the true host name in the z3950
servers file. I bet many people use the URL (or whatever it is) as the name
(so that server{name} and server{host} are the same) rather than the proper
name.

Changing the z3950 servers list on my system so that "Site" and "Hostname"
both read z3950.loc.gov worked: I entered a ISBN (which I had already
checked with yaz-client) and clicked on z3950 and the result duly appeared. 

I am not sure, however, that changing the line above to 
... connect($server{name}, server{port} ... is enough. I am sure that
someone else can check it ...

Roger
-- 
Roger Horne
11 New Square, Lincoln's Inn, London WC2A 3QB, UK
address@hidden
http://www.hrothgar.co.uk/