2023-10-16 Meeting notes

Florian Gleixner is next, followed by Jeremy Huff 

All

Maccabee Levine / Tod Olson / Jakub Skoczen / Craig McNally 

• CC: Maccabee Levine - no meeting this morning
• PC: Tod Olson - no seperate PC meeting due to the tri-council meeting

• Tri Council meeting:

  Maccabee Levine Misunderstanding of RFC process made clear

  Marc Johnson RFC primary focuses on technical aspects

  Owen Stephens TC does not have to approve the RFC as long as other councils did not.

  Craig McNally RFC process is slow

  Jeremy Huff Reason for tri-council group is due to the size of the change

  Jenn Colt need things to get started, since wolfcon only the formation of a tri-council group is decided

  Owen Stephens agrees

  Craig McNally other RFCs has non technical questions too

• RMS Group: Jakub Skoczen - skipped
• Security Team: Craig McNally - business as usual

All

• Need to review feedback from TCR evaluators and submitters - should we spin up another TCR process improvement subgroup?  
  Craig McNally So it's probably worth spinning up another group to to iterate on the the TCR process improvements. A placeholder has been created for such a subgroup.
  Maccabee Levine  volunteered to lead this group.
  Maccabee Levine : I think I'm willing to participate and lead this only if we're able to have those honest conversations about does this process still work or do we want to reframe it that that sort of thing based on a couple of weeks ago.
  Craig McNally : We can just put a message out in slack in the TC internal channel or something to see if there are any volunteers that that are willing to participate as well.

Today:

Jenn Colt will participate

Craig McNally is willing to join, but we need more participants

Jenn Colt Application Formalization could block the TCR improvement

Tod Olson depends on when Application Formalisation will show up

Maccabee Levine TCR process is partly broken as seen by the last reviews. Would not wait for Application formalization.

Marc Johnson Application formalization could make parts of TCR process obsolete or redundant

Craig McNally Need decision if we should form the group

• Possibly topic for dedicated discussion session... review decisions which are in progress.  Can any of them be accepted?  rejected?

DR-000036 - TESTCONTAINERS_POSTGRES Florian Gleixner not yet reviewed, update next week

All

• 0004 Date-time values must comply with IETF RFC-3339
• 0005 Application Formalization

RFC Process Improvements:

• https://github.com/folio-org/rfcs/pull/11 (Updates to the RFC Template) has been merged.
• https://github.com/folio-org/rfcs/pull/15 (Retroactively applying metadata changes to RFCs) has been created, please review.
• We started reviewing this document, but only made it through the 2nd Stage.  I think we will continue this effort next Wednesday

• 18 Oct 2023 - RFC process improvements continued.
• 25 Oct 2023 - Decision Log review?

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

• Check in on progress
  • Handle in Quesnelia page Quesnelia - Technical Council - FOLIO Wiki
    Taras Spashchenko together with the Kitfox team arrange testing FOLIO on PostgreSQL 13
    Craig McNally Bring Quesnelia page up to date

Previous Notes:

Marc Johnson raised a point regarding the maintenance of the dev.folio.org website. He mentioned that in the early days of Folio, this website was managed by a small group of individuals who were working on the project. However, with the project's growth, keeping the site up to date has become a challenge. Marc suggested that the community should collectively decide whether to continue maintaining the website or explore alternative platforms for sharing development information, as there are differing preferences regarding resources such as the wiki. He also observed that the dev.folio.org site is not updated frequently due to the effort involved.

• RFCs are not searchable from the wiki or dev site.  
• DRs help, but may not be applicable or enough in some cases.
  Craig McNally proposed the use of Decision Records in the RFC process, emphasizing their role in formalizing decisions and creating a wiki presence, especially for handling breaking changes. Maccabee Levine  supported this.
• ...

Craig McNally and Marc Johnson  discussed the need for a central reference and documentation hub for Folio developers. Marc raised this topic, which had also been mentioned in the "Things Folio Can Do Better" discussion. He proposed creating a developer index on the wiki to guide developers, despite the potential complexity of the task. Craig supported the idea, highlighting the challenges of finding information and improvements in GitHub search. Concluded with plans to revisit the topic in future discussions.

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.