What’s on our mind: Three short greebles

Last updated on: 24th December 2025|1st October 2025 | Jake Deery | Aspen Discovery

Greeble (n, p. Greebles): A small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object and add visual interest, particularly in movie special effects.

 

Many of my WooMs in the past have been long-form demonstrations or explanations of how we operate here at Open Fifth. This time, I am giving over my page space to three short demonstrations of three small features. My goal is to keep each demonstration:

 

1. Under 20 seconds in length (video)
2. Under 40 lines of code in length
3. Under 160 words in length (explanation)

 

Each Greeble will be something that is demonstrably inconsequential to the product in terms of feature or function, but is nonetheless extremely satisfying to have when using the product on the day-to-day.

 

Here we go!

Bug 40304: Zebrasrv config doesn’t consider non-AMD64 CPUs

Author: Jake Deery
Lines changed: 4 lines
Status: In product

Screenshot showing the code diff in Bug 40304

This patch contains four lines of code, but is the culmination of about 7 weeks of on-off work, and means that Koha’s tests can now be run on a Macbook! Hurray for all Mac users everywhere! This was very much a pan-Koha and pan-global effort, with assistance from Tomás Cohen Arazi in Argentina, and David Cook in Australia.

We’ve already since seen an uptake in development and testing on ARM-based machines, and are ourselves considering our first ARM-based deployments in the mid-term.

If you have a Mac, please consider getting involved! Drop by on Mattermost and have a chat, we can get you started!

DIS-814: Koha Driver login failure message should match Koha OPAC message

Author: Chloé Zermatten
Lines changed: 23 lines
Status: In product

This short patch improves the Aspen Discovery login errors enormously, when using Koha as the LMS. Rather than the prior generic logout error, DIS-814 now displays a warning, suggesting that (for those systems that use it), once a user has attempted and failed to log in a secretive number of times, their account will be locked out.

This empowers innocent users, because it makes clear to them there is such a lockout policy, and gives them information on what to do in such a lockout event. It also deters nay-do-gooders somewhat, because it makes it clear to them there is no prospect of a brute-force on the target system.

Overall, a very useful patch. Thanks, Chloé!

Bug 40896: Run report button should be disabled after click

Author: Jake Deery
Lines changed: 49 lines (rule-breaker!)
Status: needs sign-off

A new patch (as of Monday!), which needs some sign-off help.

This should change the behaviour of the report-runners, so that any trigger buttons or links for the guided reports will now become inactive when clicked, and the icon should change to a spinner to indicate a loading state.

The thought process behind this, is that it should avoid multi-submission of reports, which can bring down entire Koha systems. It also gives a visual on-page indicator that there is a page load in progress, so it is much clearer to the librarian that something is actually happening.

Please do give this a try on our Sandboxes service, and follow-up on the Bugzilla bug! <3