please add Z39.50 support

Is this bug for Ubuntu Dapper or Ubuntu Breezy ?

I can't reproduce it on Ubuntu Dapper.

For breezy, I didn't test it on dapper

Ok, one of the comments in the forum made me think that alexandria was unable to start. The bug is actually that Z39.50 is not included in the package.

So the question is : what's Z39.50, and why should we include support for it in the package ?

That *was* the case. Alexandria was uable to start on Breezy.
The library in question is a ruby implementation of some data interchange standard used by amazon AFAIR. I had it packaged but rather poorly (since I didn't know how to package stuff, not only ruby but any).

On 09/05/06 at 22:07 -0000, Zygmunt Krynicki wrote:
> That *was* the case. Alexandria was uable to start on Breezy.
> The library in question is a ruby implementation of some data interchange
> standard used by amazon AFAIR. I had it packaged but rather poorly (since
> I didn't know how to package stuff, not only ruby but any).

I don't get it. What's the bug then ?
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| <email address hidden> http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
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This bug is strictly about missin zoom support.

On 2006-05-09 at 21:37, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> So the question is : what's Z39.50, and why should we include
> support for it in the package ?

Z39.50 is an old protocol for searching and retrieving information from remote databases. It's important because it's the standard used by major libraries--so while Amazon, Barnes and Noble etc use web services, people like the British Library and Library of Congress still mainly use Z39.50

Support for Z39.50 in Alexandria is important for anybody who wants to retrieve accurate bibliographic data for older books, which won't show up on the Amazon and Barnes and Noble databases. I work on late-19th and early-20th-century literature, for example, and about half the books in my library are pre-ISBN. I'd like to catalogue them accurately using my British Library logon, and according to sections 8.2.3 and 8.2.5 of the Alexandria manual (V0.0.7) I can do this.

However, the relevant options don't appear in this build.

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Thanks in advance.

I didn't use alexandria for a while. Let me check and report back (I'll be checking on feisty obviously)

I haven't tested this on Feisty, so I'll wait for someone else to comment back on Fesity support. In Dapper I am currently using a patched version of the original source to get Z39.50 support, but when I upgrade to Feisty I'd like this to have been done in the package already.

Tested on Feisty. Z39.50 support is missing. It would be greatly appreciated if this could be added.

Still missing in Gutsy.

I cannot add libraries cos I cannot find the support for the z39-50 protocol on the alexandria. The help file from alexandria order do activate "advanced" settings, to be able to use z39-50 setting, but this option simple doesn't exist! please, help!

ruby-zoom would have to be packaged first AFAIK.

A Ruby/ZOOM package is available in the Alexandria Team PPA at https://launchpad.net/~alexandria-team/+archive.

In Alexandria 0.6.5 available on Karmic the "Advanced Settings" exists in the Preferences. According to the bundled online help it would allow to add a Z39.50 provider.
However this checkbox IS DISABLED! Why?
libzoom-ruby is installed, so everything seems to be there to make it work, isn't it?

I am the upstream maintainer for Alexandria, the root cause of this issue is documented on the RubyForge Tracker
http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=863&aid=27418&group_id=205

Basically, Alexandria needs the 'marc' ruby library to read data over Z39.50 (ZOOM). Older versions of Ruby/ZOOM included a 'marc' implementation, more recently the job was delegated to the marc gem (so the latest versions of libzoom-ruby in Karmic no longer include 'marc'). I am working on making a deb package (probably libmarc-ruby) which Alexandria will optionally depend on in future.

I've added a libmarc-ruby package to the Alexandria PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~alexandria-team/+archive

Installing that (along with libzoom-ruby) will give you Z39.50 support in Alexandria. But note that many Z39.50 servers are still not supported since the MARC-parsing is limited e.g. BIBSYS (Norway) and BNF (France) have produce MARC files that libmarc-ruby cannot handle.