Using the extension only to expose metadata in CKAN 2.8.3

[mdsnor]

Dear developers,
first of all, thank you for your work.
I was looking for an extension suitable for exposing metadata through the OAI-PMH protocol, and yours was the best option I could find. In our case the harvester component is not required for the moment. However, I wish to describe some challenges I had while trying to use it with CKAN 2.8.3 (however, I didn't perform a detailed analysis):

• It is not possible to use this extension alone, without other required extensions. for example it requires the ckanext-kata to be installed too, requiring its helpers and even some library dependencies in requirements.txt. And it's a chain reaction, since also the ckanext-kata comes with other dependencies...
• Some of the code is outdated, and not ready for CKAN 2.8.3 (especially in ckanext-kata)

As a workaround, after forking, I first tried to make this extension independent from ckanext-kata, by disabling some of the broken imports (we are using only part of the code), and copying and pasting the helpers from ckanext-kata to ckanext-oaipmh. It works, but following a colleague's suggestion, we opted rather to keep the ckanext-kata to be installed as a library (without enabling any plugin).

Probably it could become more useful, in my opinion, specifically in our case (no harvester needed), to:

• make the extension depending only from really necessary extensions
• maybe isolate the harvesting part from the metadata serving one (also in terms of dependencies)
• Update to latest CKAN version

Thanks!

[bhavin2897]

Hi @mdsnor

Thanks for the information and suggestions.
Could you please share the fork or suggest me any other OAI-PMH harvesters that you have been using in CKAN 2.9?
This extension (ckan-oaipmh) seems outdated as you have mentioned.

Thanks in advance.

[frafra]

Last five commits of https://github.com/NINAnor/ckanext-kata/commits/nina-version-kata have been used for CKAN 2.8.4.

[frafra]

@bhavin2897 are you interested in maintaining this extension?

[bhavin2897]

@frafra No. The best version for this extension is OAI-PMH Harvester branch py3

Maybe it would be great, if developers are looking for this harvester, and directs to latest one (above link)

Thank you for your concern

[frafra]

The problem is that there is no OAI PMH server with the alternative extension.

I found this, instead, https://github.com/EUDAT-B2FIND/ckanext-oaipmh-server, but it seems not working: EUDAT-B2FIND/ckanext-oaipmh-server#11. ckanext-spatial has some support for pycsw, but it has been broken for quite a while: ckan/ckanext-spatial#298.