2023-12-11 Meeting notes

Maccabee Levine is next, followed by Tod Olson 

Reminder:  Please copy/paste the Zoom chat into the notes.  If you miss it, this is saved along with the meeting recording, but having it here has benefits.

All

Maccabee Levine Tod Olson  Jakub Skoczen  Craig McNally Jenn Colt 

• CC: Maccabee Levine
  • No meeting this week.
  • Two submissions already for Developer Advocate position.
• PC: Tod Olson
  • More on meeting hygiene and more on Entity Management and forming a Linked Data SIG or WG.
• RMS Group: Jakub Skoczen 
  • No update
• Security Team: Craig McNally 
  • No important updates - business as usual
• Tri-council Application Formalization: Jenn Colt  
  • Started working on the council questions.

All

Quick updates only.  If we can't find volunteers for groups, we'll need to add the topic to our backlog and address it during dedicated discussion sessions.

• Distributed / Centralized Config
  • Florian Gleixner No update.  RFC submitted?
• Communicating Breaking Changes
  • on hold
• Translation / Multilingual Support
  • skipped today
• TCR Process Improvements
  • Maccabee Levine Gone through almost all of Matt Weaver 's feedback, draft changes in a PR.  Moving along well.

All

• Can we move either/both of these to the next stage?
  • 0004 Date-time values must comply with IETF RFC-3339
    • Marc Johnson it is not in public review
    • controversial opinions
    • Julian Ladisch the scope has been adjusted. We no longer require the database storage. ... It needs to be updated
    • An agreement has been reached but it needs to be reflected in the text before we move it to the next stag

RFC Process Improvements:

• Application Formalization RFC - DRAFT REFINEMENT PR:  https://github.com/folio-org/rfcs/pull/22
  • Form a subgroup
  • The RFC is in draft, needs to go forward to "public review"
  • Jeremy Huff will create a subgroup to shepherd it through the remaining process, after the meeting.
  • The group has no objections to form a subgroup to bring it to the next stage.
• Craig McNally: We need another RFC to update the metadata retroactively to reflect the new or adjusted statuses.
  • Any volunteers?
  • "Update the metadata retro-actively: Asking for another RFC
• PR "Ask for an implementation timeline" is still open
  • Anything preventing us from merging this?
  • Not aware of blockers. Presumably only a trivial task to merge it.

Notes:

• Application Fomralization:
  • Has been in Draft Refinement over a week.  Need a subgroup
  • Ingolf Kuss , Tod Olson volunteered. Craig McNally and VBar as submitters.
  • jroot : Jeremy Huff may have wanted to be involved in this one.
  • Craig McNally willing to lead.  No one considers it a conflict of interest for this stage.
• Date/time values
  • Zak Burke RFC is much larger than originally understood.  Still would be a way to improve things, but not a good way to move it forward in short term even though a good idea in the long term.  Maybe better approach is to just write better documentation to remove references to non-UTC timestamps.
  • Craig McNally Still in preliminary review stage.  Can we at least move it past that part, to draft refinement.  Then get additional feedback, and submitter takes as much time as needed before public review?
  • Zak Burke Practically may be a dead end, not worth moving ahead.  But if the only way to do that is to move it forward, publicize and allow to die there, that's ok.
  • Craig McNally Mixed up the order.  Could languish in RFC Preparation until there is a champion for it.
  • Jenn Colt This RFC has been noticed outside the TC.  Reporting group was interested.  So ok to let die but should let people know.
  • Zak Burke Fine moving it forward if that's valuable.
  • Craig McNally Can clean up documentation independent of the RFC process.  Awkward for TC to just leave in limbo.
  • Tod Olson The early version affecting dates as stored would help reporting.
  • Zak Burke That was even more impossible.  Telling APIs that they have to accept non-UTC dates was impossible.  Storing those dates was "super-galactic impossible".  Nothing in RMB even begins to handle it.  Would this actually grow legs in front of a wider audience?  Would be a big effort.  Would anything change, or we'd reach the same conclusion?
  • Craig McNally No way to know that.
  • Zak Burke will just kill it and write up an explanation on why.  Folks can notice that too.  Anyone can always pick it up later.
  • Craig McNally Indicate in the RFC itself that it's being shelved/canceled.  So no one wondering why it's never been merged.
  • Zak Burke will do that.
• PR to adjust metadata retroactively?
  • hold off for now
• Asking for the implementation timeline
  • This was merged

Previous Notes:

• DR-000038 - PostgreSQL Upgrade to 16 created by Julian Ladisch . Detailed analysis has been done to check if any of the breaking changes will impact FOLIO. There are a couple of unknowns, where it can't be easily verified if FOLIO is affected.

Last week:

• DR-000038 has been updated to Postgres 12 for Poppy Quesnelia and Postgres 16 for Ramsons...
• DR-000038 has been updated with the Postgres 13, 14, 15 and 16 module test results of the 35 biggest modules that access the database, FOLIO has 60 database accessing modules. Not a single issue has been found.
• Last week we voted "no" on supporting Postgres 13 in Quesnelia.
• Do we support a Service Patch in Quesnelia ? Sys Ops don't want to do upgrades "within the row". If we stay on 12 in Ramsons, we will be way out of support.
• On the operation side, for people managing many tenants, it is not practial to change postgres version from release to release equally for all tenants. Releases must therefore support multiple releases of Postgres (from Florian Gleixner)
• Tod: 

  Strawman: 

  Postgresql 12, with forward compatibility to PG16, i.e. database interactions must not rely on any features or behaviors removed in PG16.

• a "preliminary" or "bridge" support of 16.
• Owen: https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/C9BBWRCNB/p1701105194657329
• In the decision record "

  PostgreSQL 12 and 16 are the officially supported PostgreSQL server versions for the Quesnelia FOLIO release; PostgreSQL 12 server support ends November 14, 2024. Only PostgreSQL 12 SQL features are allowed for the Quesnelia FOLIO release; they must also work under PostgreSQL 16.

  PostgreSQL 16 is the officially supported PostgreSQL version for the Ramson FOLIO release."

• Tod: 

  In the DR: 

  "Institutions are free to use any of the not officially supported PostgreSQL versions 13, 14, and 15 for their Quesnelia installation at their own risk."

• Julian: In the DR "Decision" section: Supported server Version vs. supported SQL feature Version.
• Marc: We will have to explain this to the community.
• Jeremy: We will not support all issues that might pop up when using Postgres 16. We will address all issues that pop up using Postgres 12.
• Marc: The developers perspective is: It must work on both 12 and 16. The only way to achieve this, is to only use features of 12. To use the overlap of features of 12 and 16. Do we have (a way to) check this constraint ?
• Julian: All this has already been explained. We should vote now.
• Jeremy: The votes (of last week and about DR-38) are not mutually exclusive, so we should vote.
• Craig should put that on the agenda for next week.

Standing agenda item to review/discuss any requested or required changes to officially supported technology lists

• Check in on progress... does anything else require attention?

Quesnelia Officially Supported Technologies discussion:

• React ^18.2 is correct (Zak Burke)
• Zak Burke will check RTL support for React 18
• Cypress ^9.1.1: Talk to the people who use it and find out what they would like to do
• Update Grails from 5 to 6:
  • Craig McNally: I would rather make the statement that we need to go to 6; otherwise, the longer we wait and deliberate and evaluate and so forth that means it's less time for developers to do the actual work.
  • Marc Johnson: 100% completely agree

Moved to the next meeting:

• Formalize decisions on the following.  Quesnelia is the last chance to upgrade to avoid running unsupported versions:
  • Postgres 13 → Quesnelia 
  • Grails 6 → Quesnelia
• Postgres 15 → Ramsons
  • Wait until we see the result of Kitfox testing
• Attempt to move Quesnelia from DRAFT → ACCEPTED → ACTIVE since the relevant milestones have already passed.

• 13 Dec 2023 - Topic TBD
• 18 Dec 2023 - Regular TC meeting
• ...
• 02 Jan 2024 - Chairs Meeting (Tentative)

Previous Notes:

• A workflow for these pages. When do they transition from one state to another. Do we even need statuses at all ?
• Stripes architecture group has some questions about the Poppy release.
• Zak: A handshake between developers, dev ops and the TC. Who makes that decision and how do we pass along that knowledge ? E.g. changes in Nodes and in the UI boxes. How to communicate this ? We have a large number of teams, all have to be aware of it.  TC should be alerted that changes are happening. We have a couple of dedicated channels for that. Most dev ops have subscribed to these channels. How can dev ops folk raise issues to the next level of community awareness ? There hasn't been a specific piece of TC to move that along.
• Craig: There is a fourth group, "Capacity Planning" or "Release Planning". Slack is the de facto communication channel.  There are no objections to using Slack. An example is the Java 17 RFC. 
• Craig: The TC gets it on the agenda and we will discuss it. The TC gets the final say.
• Marc Johnson: We shouldn’t use the DevOps Channel. The dev ops folks have made it clear that it should only be used for support requests made to them.
• Jakub: Our responsibility is to avoid piling up technical debt.
• Marc: Some set of people have to actually make the call. Who lowers the chequered flag ?
• Craig: It needs to ultimately come to the TC at least for awareness. There is a missing piece. Capacity Planning needs to provide input here. 
• Marc: Stakeholders / Capacity Planning could make that decision. Who makes the decision ? Is it the government or is it some parts of the body ?
• Marc: the developers community, the dev ops community and sys ops are involved. For example the Spring Framework discussion or the Java 17 discussion. But it was completely separate to the TC decision. It is a coordination and communication effort.
• Marc: Maybe the TC needs to let go that they are the decision makers so that they be a moderating group.
• Jakub: I agree with Marc. But we are not a system operating group. Dependency management should be in the responsibility of Release management. There are structures in the project for that.
• Jason Root: I agree with Jakub and with Marc also. Policies should drive operational/release/support aspects of Folio.
• Jason Root: If the idea of “support” is that frameworks are supported, then of course the project should meet that.
• Marc Johnson
  Some group needs to inform OleksAii when a relevant policy event occurs.
  These documents effectively ARE the manifestation of the policy.
• Craig: This is a topic for the next Monday session.

• Craig to see if Oleksii Petrenko could join us to discuss the process for updating the officially supported technologies lists.

Possible topic/activity for a Wednesday session:

• Discuss/brainstorm:
  • Ideas for the type of developer-facing documentation we think would be most helpful for new developers
  • How we might bring existing documentation up to date and ensure it's consistent 
  • etc.