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Koha Hackfest 2026 in Marseille

I just spend another fun and productive week in Marseille at the Koha Hackfest hosted by BibLibre. We (Mark, tadzik and me) arrived on Sunday (via plane from Vienna or Poland, and I came by train from Berlin via Strasbourg) and left on Friday.

There where the usual interesting discussions on all things Koha, presentations of new features and of course a lot of socializing. And cheese, so much cheese...

Elasticsearch

On the first day there was a discussion on Elasticsearch and getting rid of Zebra (the old search engine used by Koha). Actually getting rid of Zebra is not an option (now), because small installation won't want to set up and run Elasticsearch. But Mark proposed using our Marc Normalization Plugin as the basis for a new internal, DB-only search engine (so no need for an external index etc) and over the course of the week (and with LLM help) implemented a prototype. It would really be amazing if we could get this running!

I worked a bit on improving Elasticsearch indexing:

  • Bulk biblio ES index update after auth change: When merging (or updating) authorities, the Elasticsearch indexing of the linked biblios now will happen in one background job per authority instead of one background job per biblio. So an authority that is used in 100 biblios will now trigger one indexing background job with 100 biblio items instead of 100 background jobs with 1 biblio item each.
  • Zebraqueue should not be added to when only Elasticsearch is used: We added a new syspref "ElasticsearchEnableZebraQueue". If disabled, no data will be written to the zebraqueue table, because usually when using Elasticsearch you don't need to also run Zebra.

I got sign-offs and Pass-QA for both issues during the hackfest, thanks Fridolin, Paul and Baptiste (who owns the coolest tea mug at BibLibre..)

QA

I also did QA on a bunch of other issues: 22639, 35267, 36550, 39158, 40906, 41767, 41967, 42107. Some of them where of interest to me, some I did because other people nicely asked me to :-)

LLM, "AI" and Agentic Coding

This was again a hot topic, with some people using those tools to great effect, some hating them, and some in between. As in my last post on the German Perl Workshop I again want to point out this blog post: I Sold Out for $20 a Month and All I Got Was This Perfectly Generated Terraform, and during the event the post Thoughts on slowing the fuck down dropped (by Mario Zechner, who wrote the coding agent I (currently) use).

Anyway, Koha now has some guidelines on AI and LLM-assisted contributions and on using LLM features inside Koha.

Claude vs domm

While working on unit tests for Bug 40577 I struggled with a test failing only if I run the whole test script (as opposed to only the one subtest I was working on). It seemed to be a problem with mocked tests, so I asked Joubu (who was by chance just standing next to me). Together we figured out the scoping problem: If you use Test::MockObject/MockModule multiple times on a class from different scopes, the mocked methods/functions might not automatically be removed. You have to call unmock explicitly. After the patch was done, I described the error to Claude and asked for a fix, expecting to not get anything useable. But (to my slight horror) it produced the correct explanation and fix in very short time. On the one hand: amazing; on the other hand: very scary.

Other random stuff:

  • When it rains and a TGV arrives at the station, more people have the idea to take a taxi than taxis are available. So walking the short distance was necessary, but we (Katrin, who I met on the train, and me) still got wet. At least we had cold burgers...
  • Paul showed me a non-Koha tool he has written: mdv - A terminal markdown viewer with vim keybindings. Very nice, I especially like it to view checkouts of gitlab wikis!
  • I was not the only Team Scheisse fan attending! Philip++
  • Philip also pointed out the very detailed and interesting shared notes produced by various attendees during the event.
  • At my third visit to Marseille, I manage to navigate the city center quite well.
  • I finally made it to the Tangerine record store, very nice selection. I still did not let the shop owner talk me into buying a 200€ original UK pressing of Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division.
  • I did not get Moule Frits, but at least some Galette and Cidre.
  • After being to Senegal in February, I now realized that there are a lot of places selling Yassa and Mafe in Marseille. I guess they where there last year too, I just did not see them, having never eaten Yassa or Mafe before.
  • It can get very windy in Marseille.
  • I should do it like Jake(?) and cycle (at least partly) to the next hackfest.

Thanks

Thanks to BibLibre and Paul Poulain for organizing the event, and to all the attendees for making it such a wonderful 5 days!

Looking forward to meet you all again at the upcoming KohaCon in Karlsruhe

Updates

  • 2026-03-03: Added link to shared notes.