2025-06-09 Meeting notes

Date

Jun 9, 2025

Attendees

@Jenn Colt
@Craig McNally
@Maccabee Levine
@Kevin Day
@Jason Root
@Matt Weaver
@Joshua Greben

Time	Item	Who	Notes

Time	Item	Who	Notes
1 min	Scribe		@Marc Johnson is next, followed by @Ingolf Kuss Marc will be late and won’t be able to take notes. After Ingolf is Julian. @Maccabee Levine took notes since he’s next alphabetically. 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.
5-15 min	Liaison Updates	@Maccabee Levine @Tod Olson @Jakub Skoczen @Craig McNally	CC: @Maccabee Levine: Election nominees: 10 CC, 6 PC, 5 TC. CC asking TC to help get more nominees. Actually TC only has 5 open seats. Member meeting reflections. Budget contributions from EBSCO for FY26. General comments that community should fund its infrastructure, but currently community doesn't have the budget to do so. CC voted to maintain the ask for this year but to work to move away from it for FY27 via more membership revenue. PC: @Tod Olson / @Marc Johnson RMS Group: Jakub not present Security Team: @Craig McNally: Business as usual Eureka Early Adopters: @Craig McNally: Latest status updates can be found here , spreadsheet there is up-to-date Meeting every other week now. Community Driven Development: Working on a definition of CDD, along with scope of group. See Community Driven Development Working Group
5-10 min	Upcoming Meetings	All	Jun 11, 2025 - Dedicated Discussion - Environmental variables and Folio multitenant upgrade problem Jun 16, 2025 - Regular TC Meeting Jun 18, 2025 - Dedicated Discussion - TBD Jun 23, 2025 - Regular TC Meeting Jun 25, 2025 - Dedicated Discussion - Evaluating existing modules Dedicated Discussion Topics: Kong/Keycloak and flower releases - treat them like infrastructure or like modules? Okapi support proposal Support Ramsons with Okapi until 2026-03-31: – FOLIO Security Group's decision regarding extention of Ramsons support period: "Secuity group suggests to not extend the support period because Spring based modules are out of support, unless all Spring base modules get updated to a supported Spring version." The dev teams have released the 6 Okapi-specific modules for Sunflower: Okapi multi-flower-release 6.2.x, mod-authtoken 2.17.x, mod-login-saml 2.10.x, mod-consortia 1.3.x, mod-login 7.13.x, mod-permissions 6.7.x The snapshot reference environments and the Karate tests have successfully been running Sunflower with Okapi. Institutions that want to run Sunflower with Okapi may need to set up a Sunflower Okapi Bugfest environment. FOLIO contribution network proposal: @Craig McNally Is this in discussion or for approval? @Jenn Colt Still in discussion Environmental variables - Kevin/Sysops problem statement Folio multitenant upgrade problem could be discussed during dedicated discussion about environment variables. inconsistencies among variable naming across modules Ingolf will address this in Sys Ops SIG 2025-05-07 Sys Ops & Management SIG Agenda and Meeting Notes some problems with increased memory (from Q → R) and JAVA_OPTIONS parameters. Many modules have to be adapted for more memory. Many out-of-memory events and heap-space events. problems with the ENV variable. Kafka topics use that and also the Elasticsearch index. Maybe the ENV variable should be named better. Maybe it should be only for Kafka. It is not good to use the ENV variable for two purposes. Upgrades get broken if you don't change the value of ENV between releases on a muti-tenant system. env variables with dots: e.g. okapi.url , tenant.url, kong.url , am.url . This is inconsistent and can cause errors. For mod-fqm-manager, there are lowercase variables with dots. See: Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6, IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition, Environment Variables Spring Boot doc: Externalized Configuration Binding From Environment Variables where are the pain points ? What problems have system admins encountered ? variables with different names in different modules, but which express the same quantity inconsistent naming (KC_, KEYCLOAK_, ...) 2025-05-12 Sysops did have this discussion, @Ingolf Kuss will share the notes in Slack. Developer Advocate Evaluating existing modules Communication plan to promote updates to OST pages Need to update OST pages with communication plan changes Need a retro on changes to OST(?) TC Roles and Responsibilities Has this been influenced by CC adopting a vision statement that the community should direct FOLIO development? FQM RFC WOLFcon Planning OST discussion around the Grails 7 and Java 17 issues; get to talk to the stakeholders there might be a securiry issue to it OST Trillium: Spring Boot 4.0: As the next minor version after 3.5 is 4.0 we should replace or Spring Boot 3.6 decision with Spring Boot 4.0: https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot#support Issue about the Eureka release schedule - do we want to come back to it ? Continued third-party support during release periods Prompted by Kong/Keycloak and Spring Boot, plus extra-long Trillium cycle Should probably talk about this more generally, beyond these specific examples
0 min	TCR Board Review	All	Nothing on the board
0 min	Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates	All	Presently there are no active TC subgroups
1 min	GitHub RFCs Wiki RFCs	All	Anything we need to discuss here?
5 min	Decision Log	All	No new decisions. Related to mod-configuration: Deprecation of mod-configuration DR-000039 - Distributed vs. centralized configuration @Craig McNally some teams still use it. Developers are aware of the deprecation. Do we need to follow the timing plan with a readonly transition step or or can we just remove mod-configuration in Trillium or Umbrellaleaf? Probably developers need some time? @Jenn Colt Is managing this via RFC unusual? @Craig McNally We did it for some other things too: Postgres / Eureka… @Craig McNally will talk to developers, if they can make the transition, then stick to the plan, dropping the readonly phase, when not needed. If developers need more time, extend the plan to Umbrellaleaf. @Florian Gleixner if the plan can not be fulfilled, a formal decision to extend the plan should be made. Oleksii P. doesn’t have an answer for the scope of remaining work yet. Waiting to hear back from individual teams. Stay tuned; we should have an answer soon.
5 min	Officially Supported Technologies (OST)	All	Anything we need to discuss here, e.g. related to folio-kong/folio-keycloak? From last meeting: Action item: update OST to include the new section and the policy that hosts are encouraged to stay on the latest version. Keep text regarding support policies and release predictions - first draft done @Jenn Colt did the editing, but no communication done yet. She will post in the appropriate channels. Action item: Release management needs to be made aware @Jakub Skoczen
1 min	Elections	All	The nomination window has been extended to Jun 13, 2025. Based on Boaz’s message earlier today in #folio-tech-council, it sounds like we have exactly enough nominees to fill the 5 open seats.
5-10 min	Best practices / Conventions	All	Raising awareness: From @Zak Burke in #folio-stripes-updates: Over the next few sprints (#220 and #221) we are planning to make the following changes to GitHub settings for all the stripes-* repos: require a PR before merging (it will no longer be possible to push commits directly to the main branch) require PR approval (at least 1 approval will be required before a PR can be merged) rename the default branch from `master` to `main` (we currently have a mixture of both; `main` has been the GitHub default since 2022) Additional details in the thread below. If you have questions or concerns, please comment or visit #folio-stripes-architecture on Thursdays at 10 ET / 14 UTC. I’ve been asked to remind everyone that project documentation is a collaborative effort. If you see documentation is lacking or incorrect, please help fix it rather than asking someone else to do so.
NA	Zoom Chat

Topic Backlog
Decision Log Review	All	Review decisions that are in progress. Can any of them be accepted? rejected?
Translation Subgroup	All	Since we're having trouble finding volunteers for a subgroup, maybe we can make progress during a dedicated discussion session?
Communicating Breaking Changes	All	Currently there is a PoC, developed by @Maccabee Levine, of a utility to catalog Github PRs that have been labeled with the "breaking change" label. We would like to get developer feedback on the feasibility of this label being used more often, and the usefulness of this utility.
Officially Supported Technologies - Upkeep	All	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.
Dev Documentation Visibility	All	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.
API linting within our backend modules	All	https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CAQ7L02PP/p1713343461518409 Hello team, I would like to discuss API linting within our backend modules. Some time ago, we transitioned our linting process from Jenkins to GitHub Actions as outlined in https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/FOLIO-3678. I am assuming that this move was done via some technical council decision. Please correct me if I'm wrong. In my observations, I've found two problems: Schema linting does not occur if the schemas are in YAML format. There are issues with resolving some deeper references during API linting. Although I'm unsure about how to improve the existing linting implementations within Folio, I propose to consider an open-source solution that handles OpenAPI linting effectively and allows us to define custom rules. For your reference: https://stoplight.io/open-source/spectral A test of this solution can be found in this PR: https://github.com/folio-org/mod-search/pull/567. The same PR also provides an example of custom rule definition: https://github.com/folio-org/mod-search/pull/567/files#diff-d5da7cb43c444434994b76f3b04aa6e702c09e938de09dbc09d72569d611d9ab.Also, by employing 'Spectral', I discovered AsyncAPI (https://www.asyncapi.com/en), an API design tool similar to OpenAPI but for asynchronous interactions. I suggest that we consider using AsyncAPI in FOLIO to generate documentation for Kafka interactions.
PR Templates	All	https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CAQ7L02PP/p1713445649504769 Hello team, Small request to consider. Regarding pr templates. From my perspective, pr template is not good idea. Even the biggest open source projects that are contributed by many people don't have any pr template. Currently what we have for acq modules https://github.com/folio-org/mod-orders-storage/blob/master/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md These pr template is inconsistent in different teams. What I suggest is that, pr template shouldn't be any instructions, because most developer who are creating pr have already understand the rules. If we put just two section into template, it will encourage developers to write more about their work and that lead to knowledge sharing among developers.
Proposed Mod Kafka	All	https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CAQ7L02PP/p1714471592534689 Mike Taylor Proposal. If and only if a FOLIO instance is running Kafka, it should insert and enable a module called mod-kafka, which consists entirely of a module descriptor that says it provides the interface kafka. The purpose is so that other modules can use the standard <IfInterface> and similar tools to determine whether they should attempt Kafka operations. Rationale: the FOLIO ILS depends absolutely on Kafka, but other uses of the platform will not. One such example: a dev platform that includes only mod-users, used as a source of change events for Metadb.