2024-02-21 - Communicating Breaking Changes

Ankita Sen is next, followed by Taras Spashchenko.  It might make sense for Taras to take this on today since I think Ankita might be helping drive the conversation today.

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. 

Background/Context:  Since we're having trouble finding volunteers for a subgroup, the thought was to try and make progress during a dedicated discussion session...

From the Subgroups page:

• Defining the mechanisms for communicating breaking changes when they occur.
• Educating/communicating to developers what constitutes a breaking change (beyond sharing the DR)
• Meet with representatives from dev teams to review what a breaking change is, and what to do when they happen. (or video, etc.) 

Goal:  Define the mechanisms for communicating breaking changes when they occur

Notes:

• ...

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.

• Do common libraries used to build in approved frameworks need to be on this list? Such as spring-way and spring-module-core.

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.