Frequency of upgrades, especially during academic year

sjkimball
I provide training and support for Zotero at my academic institution. The IT department uses PCR Dist to image all of our public machines across campus. That means we must pick a moment in time to settle on the version of Zotero that will be on the machines for the duration of the semester. PCR Dist overwrites any manual upgrade done by individuals. The problem is that students regularly upgrade Zotero on their laptops and personal machines, rendering their Libraries unusable on our public machines. Has there been any discussion about limiting the upgrades during the academic year or making Libraries versatile between minor version tweaks?

I love Zotero and the students love it but the data problems get in the way of making it as simple as it could be for them. Thanks, Susan
  • adamsmith
    If the students use syncing for the libraries, do they really run into version issues? That would really be the way to go and it seems to work)
    (I'm no IT specialist at all, but all institutions I've ever been to allow users to install and upgrade firefox add-ons.)
  • sjkimball
    The problem with syncing to Zotero.org is that it doesn't allow them to sync all their attached files. We are working on setting up a WebDAV server which hopefully will allow us to make the libraries more portable but right now we are stuck with connecting to their network drives.
    Just to clarify, they can manually upgrade each time but it gets overwritten when the image is rewritten overnight. The PCR Dist image makes maintenance of public machines much easier but these are the kinds of downsides that exist.
  • bdarcus
    Doesn't solve the immediate problem, but Isn't the notion of freezing software for an entire term likely to only become increasingly anachronistic over time?
  • sjkimball
    Perhaps so but maintenance of public computer labs requires some level of control. I'm also not an IT person but I don't know of other systems that allow more flexibility in this regard. We are constantly trying to strike a balance between usability and simplifying maintenance.
  • CB
    Whose academic year should Zotero's release schedule be tied to? It might make sense for a non-internationalised app sold locally before we had the internet. bdarcus is right about the anachronism, except that the becoming has happened.
  • CB
    @adamsmith: conversely, I haven't yet come across an institution-owned machine I can install FF extensions on. Actually I've had to (temporarily, I hope) switch to using Mendeley because it has a read/write web app I can access anywhere.
  • Bionatsci
    I think the fact that Zotero 2.0 is beta software also needs to be considered here. When Zotero 2.0 Final is released it should have, I imagine, a significantly longer release schedule. It might be feasible to think about upgrade interval limitations then (perhaps in a seperate release - similar in concept to the ubuntu LTS releases). However, while Zotero 2.0 remains beta software any upgrade interval limitation would, IMHO, defeat the very purpose of a beta release, which is to obtain user feedback and bug reports, followed by fixes/new features and feedback on these in turn. The slowdown of Zotero development which would be imposed by limiting upgrades, would, IMO, be too high a price to pay to solve version problems with institutional installations.
    I haven't yet come across an institution-owned machine I can install FF extensions on.
    FWIW my university uses a system where, AFAIK, firefox profiles are stored in a user's personal directory, and can be customised as much as any individual user wishes - including the installation of extensions. I also seem to be able to customise any other programs I want to (although not install new ones) - so it might run deeper than simple individual profile storage. Unfortunately I don't know the technical details of the system they use.
  • adamsmith
    edited September 28, 2009
    FWIW my university uses a system where, AFAIK, firefox profiles are stored in a user's personal directory, and can be customised as much as any individual user wishes - including the installation of extensions. I also seem to be able to customise any other programs I want to (although not install new ones) - so it might run deeper than simple individual profile storage. Unfortunately I don't know the technical details of the system they use.
    That's been my experience at Northwestern and at the Max Planck Institute I visited in Germany, too.
  • CB
    Well, I am in Australia, where the merest smell of non-Microsoft software tends to make IT people and management spivs incandescent with rage.
  • dstillman
    Barring some serious issue that needs to be fixed, we have no intention of doing DB upgrades for 2.0.x point releases after 2.0 Final. The 2.0 codebase will be branched at that point, and active development will continue on the trunk.

    In general I'd have to agree with Bruce, though. There's undoubtedly some overhead in prepping and testing new images, but central management and regular upgrades aren't mutually exclusive. There's obviously a balance to strike, but "duration of the semester" seems a bit too far to one side, at least for point releases that fix bugs and security issues. I would think you'd need to update the image immediately once a Firefox security upgrade came out, for example.
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