2024-02-19 Meeting notes

 Jakub Skoczen

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.

Maccabee Levine

Tod Olson

Jakub Skoczen

Craig McNally

Jenn Colt 

• CC: Maccabee Levine
• PC: Tod Olson 
  • Presentation from Discovery Integration Subgroup of SysOps, survey and discussion of how FOLIO supports integration with discovery interfaces; see links from Results of the survey.
  • General dissatisfaction with current state of edge APIs, many (most?) are doing some or all integrations for live data through the Okapi APIs, as the edge APIs for discovery do not provide everything.
  • Some lower-level needs are not met at all, such as sorting multi-item display by volume.
  • Question about whether it is worth maintaining things like edge-rtac.
  • Unclear if there is a TC role in this.
• RMS Group: Jakub Skoczen No meeting this week, will ask Oleksii Petrenko for updates regarding the Sunflower timeline.
• Security Team: Craig McNally 
  • No important updates - business as usual
• Tri-council Application Formalization: Jenn Colt 
  • Question for the next meeting are in Slack so can be reviewed there.

All

• TCR-37 (and TCR-35 and TCR-36) Jeremy Huff to touch base with Ingolf Kuss
• TCR-33
  • Evaluation results ready to be presented.
  • There was only one criterion that wasn't met (vert.x version not on par with requirements for Quesnalia) but was addressed in an open PR
  • The module will be accepted during the next TC meeting when the PR to update vert.x is merged.
  • Quesnalia vert.x version has been set on 4.5.* but core components (Okapi, folio-vertx-lib) have not been upgraded yet so the team must wait for these upgrades first
• Discussion around the approval process and the lack of process/checks for existing modules which had been previously approved
• Expect Serials app to come to PC and TC soon-ish. (Had gone to PC months ago, but no formal decision.)

• 21 Feb 2024 - Dedicated Topic Discussion - Communicating Breaking Changes
• 26 Feb 2024 - Regular TC Meeting
• 26 Feb 2024 - (Tentative) Folio chairs meeting
• 28 Feb 2024 - Topic TBD

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.

• Golang: DRAFT REVIEW of the RFC and #golang Slack channel created for discussion
• App formalization: questions for Tod to see if more information is required before moving it to the public review

All

• Application Formalization RFC - DRAFT REFINEMENT PR:  https://github.com/folio-org/rfcs/pull/22
  • Previous Notes:
    • Comment threads responded to.  Still waiting to hear back if these can be resolved or not...
• Go Programming Language for Backend Development RFC - PRELIMINARY REVIEW PR: https://github.com/folio-org/rfcs/pull/25
  • Previous Notes:
    
    • Jakub Skoczen will finish steps on Preliminary Review, push to next phase, Draft Refinement.  Get feedback from TC members and others.
    • Subgroup volunteers: Jeremy Huff Matt Weaver Ingolf Kuss 
    • Ensure we have membership from people familiar and not familiar with Go.  Maybe post in #development
• Distributed vs Centralized Configuration RFC - DRAFT REFINEMENT PR: https://github.com/folio-org/rfcs/pull/26

RFC Process Improvements:

• We need another RFC to update the metadata retroactively to reflect the new or adjusted statuses. - Jenn Colt

The announcements were made before the holidays.  No objections. Probably need to ask testing people explicitly. 

See: DR-000038 - PostgreSQL Upgrade to 16

Notes:

• Craig McNally is still discussing with Yogesh Kumar and Oleksii Petrenko.  Stay tuned.

Standing agenda item... is there anything in the decision log requiring attention? 

• ...

On 14 Feb 2024 we reviewed the page, but weren't ready to move it to ACCEPTED yet as there were some unknowns related to Jest/RTL, Yarn, etc.  Craig McNally clarified those points with UI devs (Zak Burke) and I think we're now ready to give a final review and accept the page.

• Third party technologies APPROVED during the TC meeting (no objections)

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?
• Next Important Milestone:  Review Ramsons (3rd party dependencies) and move from DRAFT → ACCEPTED by 16 Feb 2024 
  • Maybe we should aim to start looking at this on 05 Feb 2024 so we have time for discussion/adjustments
• Notes from 12 Feb 2024 (this meeting):
  • On Wed, try to move Ramsons OST from DRAFT to ACCEPTED.
  • Two activities in preparation 
    • Review policies and reasoning on page with intent to vote on approval
    • Look at third-party dependencies.
  • NOTE: Java 17 support will run out, see conflicting dates but possibly Sep. 2024, need someone to dig into this.
• Notes from this (5 Feb 2024?) meeting:
  • Maccabee Levine described updates to the process examples and walked through the example with Craig McNally who raised minor amendments
  • Marc Johnson suggested that there will only be 2 releases in 2024. Owen Stephens  and Craig McNally asked if anyone was aware of an official announcement on this
  • Craig McNally asked when there would be 4 active flower releases? Marc Johnson advised that there will be 4 releases when the previous 2 are in support, the current one is being released (and has not become generally available) and the next release has started development (after the feature freeze for the current release)
  • Marc Johnson shared the draft inclusion of policy decisions and reasoning for each type of technology in the Ramsons OST page
    
    • Craig McNally asked TC members to provide feedback on these changes

Notes:

• Marc Johnson last week fixed an OST example about timing at feature development freeze.
• TCR Process Improvement PR now refers to "most recent ACTIVE" release.
• Ramsons will move to ACCEPTED later this month 2/16.  So should start looking at it.
  • This means we have to now (by 2/16) nail down the third-party dependencies.
  • Need versions on FE languages.  Need FE review of FE build tools, etc.  Craig McNally flagged Zak Burke Yogesh Kumar on various parts of the page.
  • BE: No plans to move to new Java, Groovy.  Julian Ladisch made several wiki page comments on versions.
  • For "unspecified versions" items, we should not be listing versions?  Have to either adopt new policy or not.
• We'll discuss this Wednesday.
• Marc Johnson brief recap:
  • Three policies and reasons behind them.
    • Unspecified Versions. 
      • Dev teams take responsibility for using the latest version they can sensibly use.  Needs to be supported. 
      • TC doesn't dictate version because the version doesn't have to be aligned across modules.  It may be de facto aligned anyway, i.e. Vertx may be constrained by version of RAML Modules.  Similarly FOLIO Spring Base.  Or Stripes will dictate the version of React.
    • One of Specified Versions. 
      • Expect module developers to comply with one of the specified versions, i.e. Java 17 or 21.  The platform will support both.  Individual modules just need to run on one or the other.
    • All of Specified Versions. 
      • Modules are supposed to work with all of the specified versions.  I.e. Postgres during Quesnelia, modules have to work with 14-17.  At any one time it would only be run with one, but has to be able to run with any of them.
  • Allocation of each software to a policy depends how much project-wide alignment we need about that tool.  There is a reasoning statement for each one explaining why.
• Craig McNally helpful to link to products' support pages so dev teams can see which versions are supported easily.  Not a blocker on Ramsons moving to ACCEPTED.
  • Marc Johnson agree
  • Everyone read to be able to discuss on Wednesday.
  • Glossary will be moved out of Ramsons page.  Maybe to a separate page or the OST homepage.

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.