2013 marc breakout

Attendees: some with no MARC4J/SolrMarc experience, some using MARC4J outside of SolrMarc.

Basics

What is it? Java library for working with MARC records.

Supports MARC21 and Unicode; may be more robust for MARC21.

Migration

There is now a Marc4j organization on GitHub to migrate content out of Tigris/CVS.

Goal: centralize management of the project so versions can be tracked more easily (i.e. no more custom versions bundled in SolrMarc that exist nowhere else).

No objections to moving Marc4j to GitHub.

Bob will talk to Bas about putting a "we've moved" notice in the old Tigris/CVS repo.

Other Issues

ICU4j embedding

Issue: Marc4j builds its code tables using a normalizer borrowed from the ICU4j library. ICU library is huge, so normalizer is bundled into Marc4j by itself. This saves space but makes it more complex/difficult to update ICU4j dependency.

Should we continue to bundle subset of ICU4j, or should we simply add ICU4j as a straight dependency and not worry about the space savings?

Group decision: yes. No objections.

Version Numbers

Current GitHub version is 2.5.1 beta.

Proposal: clean up/test, then start semantic versioning with 2.6.0.

Start release notes/change history file in repo. Joe will look into this.

Group decision: yes. No objections.

Test Coverage

Current level of coverage: unknown.

Possible project: borrow tests from other MARC libraries and adapt for Marc4j to improve coverage.

Continuous Integration

Simple solution: create Travis-CI hook in GitHub to run tests (probably using existing Ant script for now).

Future project: begin measuring test coverage.

Dependency Management

We need to get Marc4j into the Maven central repository so that it can be easily included in other projects.

Bill Dueber will look at introducing Ivy for dependency management within Marc4j.

Simon's Pull Request

Simon Spero submitted a large pull request to rearrange code (including some Ivy-related work). Bob will review.