Update on the JHOVE handover

There’s a brief piece by Becky McGuinness in D-Lib Magazine on the handover of JHOVE to the Open Preservation Foundation. It describes upcoming plans:

During March the OPF will be working with Portico and other members to complete the transfer of JHOVE to its new home. The latest code base will move to the OPF GitHub organisation page. All documentation, source code files, and full change history will be publicly available, alongside other OPF supported software projects, including JHOVE2, Fido, jpylyzer, and the SCAPE project tools.

Once the initial transfer is complete the next step will be to set up a continuous integration (CI) build on Travis, an online CI service that’s integrated with GitHub. This will ensure that all new code submissions are built and tested publicly and automatically, including all external pull requests. This will establish a firm foundation for future changes based on agile software development best practises.

With this foundation in place OPF will test and incorporate JHOVE fixes from the community into the new project. Several OPF members have already developed fixes based on their own automated processes, which they will be releasing to the community. Working as a group these fixes will be examined and tested methodically. At the same time the OPF’s priority will be to produce a Debian package that can be downloaded and installed from its apt repository.

Following the transfer OPF will gather requirements from its members and the wider digital preservation community. The OPF aims to establish and oversee a self-sustaining community around JHOVE that will take these requirements forward, carrying out roadmapping exercises for future development and maintenance. The OPF will also assess the need for specific training and support material for JHOVE such as documentation and online or virtual machine demonstrators.

It’s great to know that JHOVE still has a future a decade after its birth, but what boggles my mind is the next sentence:

The transfer of JHOVE is supported by its creators and developers: Harvard Library, Portico, the California Digital Library, and Gary McGath.

I never expected to see my name in a list like that!