2025-08-25 Meeting notes

1 min

Scribe

@Kevin Day followed by @Shelley Doljack

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

@Christie Thomas

@Craig McNally

• CC:  @Maccabee Levine:

  • Tri-Council meetings

    • This Thursday at 10 ET (PC timeslot). Hot Topics. Zoom

    • At WOLFcon 9/26 at 9am CT

      • Tri-council will be the first.

  • Core problems and Solutions to explore (see Document tabs) of "Shared Reflections: A Sustainable Future for the FOLIO Community" doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13yVmmTAvdLXUIwKMDl_b2ZbayNsbuxcnnRCpQC_8Kkw/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.hnqt12qh2vex

    • September meetings to move solutions doc towards specific actions.

  • Line Item Contributions Group model proposal. Not a membership, something optional (for non-member institutions) tacked on to SASS bill by community request, opt-out.

  • KInt dependencies issue to be discussed at an upcoming meeting.

  • Looking for volunteer regarding bringing discussion to the community council (there should be a follow up relating slack message).

    • (context of security) Julian has concerns about the library dependencies being out of date.

• PC: @Christie Thomas

  • Mosaic orders app integration endorsed by PC.

  • Council chairs are starting a newsletter.

  • Community priorities presentations started with a discussion of the Discovery SIG top 5.

  • PC will have a vision workshop at WolfCon.

• RMS Group:

  • Not meeting until Aug 26, 2025

• Security Team:

  • @Kevin Day : Concern about Grails 7 Update. In August 2024 K-Int said that they want to migrate their modules from Grails to Micronaut within ~ 5 years. But there will be security issues in that time that we can not address. We might need up to speed up that timeframe. We need to find a solution to this problem. It touches a broader topic: How do we want to handle the shorter release cycles. Maccabee will follow up on that with Owen and Ian. Olamide will create a topic for that.

• 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 (@Jenn Colt / @Maccabee Levine):

  • (nothing new)

• Wolfcon 2025: There will most likely be a shoulder meeting for the councils.

  • TC has not had a formal agenda in the past (in the past, we have done a recap).

    • It could be the same thing this year.

• @Oleksii Petrenko has updates on Spring-Boot changes, describing expected migrations.

  • There are eight steps describing the risk and effort needed.

  • This process will cost additional time, but if allowed, then we might have Spring-Boot 4.

5-10 min

Upcoming Meetings

All

• Aug 25, 2025 - Regular TC meeting

• Aug 27, 2025 - Dedicated discussion: FOLIO futures?

• Aug 28, 2025 - Tri council meeting during PC timeslot

• Sep 1, 2025 - No meeting - US holiday

• Sep 3, 2025 - Regular TC meeting moved to Wednesday due to Monday holiday

• Dedicated Discussion Topics:

  • Revisit issues around breaking changes: https://github.com/folio-org/ui-courses/pull/349

    • PR has been merged

  • New TC member orientation in Early July

    • What do new members need to do?

    • What does TC need to do around permissions in Wiki, GitHub; other administrative tasks?

    • Appoint another co-chair

  • FOLIO contribution network proposal:

    • @Craig McNally Is this in discussion or for approval?

    • @Jenn Colt Still in discussion

    • Topic for next Wednesday’s meeting.

      • What would TC’s perspective be on how a contribution network would operate?

      • There are two related proposals that need to be considered and should be discussed more broadly.

  • 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?

  • OST discussion around the Grails 7 and Java 17 issues; get to talk to the stakeholders

    • There might be a security issue to it.

    • This is separate from the OST topic above.

    • We might not be able to upgrade to Grails 7 for the Sunflower and we may not be able to get to this on Trillium.

      • Is this in scope of Trillium, or do we need to put this on Umbrellaleaf?

      • We need to schedule a meeting on this with the appropriate parties to plan this out.

  • 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

  • mod-mosaic and the Gobi group.

0 min

TCR Board Review

All

• https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/TCR-57

  • Do we need the reference data criterium if it is optional?

    • Do we sometimes have modules where there is a value and making this required?

      • It depends on how we use the module; if we do not need the feature, then it is optional.

    • If one just runs mod-mosaic, then a configuration is not needed. If the mod-mosaic needs to be use, then a configuration is required.

      • In this case, if the template ID is always provided, then the module will work even if the configuration is not provided.

      • If another ID is used, then the configuration is required.

      • There can be only one configuration record.

      • See suggestion by @Julian Ladisch (in TCR-57 comments).

    • This module's design is confusing for operators.

      • It seems harsh to fail them on this and can they make it simpler?

      • We should clarify this requirement for affecting future modules and for now ask them to improve their design now.

        • There is currently no consensus of if this technically violates the criterium but the TC does believe that this design should not be allowed.

        • @Wayne Schneider, and possibly @Ingolf Kuss, should contact the mod-mosaic developers regarding this decision.

        • We need a volunteer to take care of improving the wording of the criterium.

  • Lazy consensus approved given the stipulations.

• https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/TCR-58

• Existing module evaluation process

  • @Maccabee Levine shared some suggested talking points in #tc-internal

3 min

Existing Module Evaluation

ALL

• @Maccabee Levine created a spreadsheet

  with some information like age of repository on existing modules which could be used to see which modules need review. Julian also had the idea in slack to use sonar metrics to decide which modules get picked.

• mod-search and ui-export-manager has been chosen to be first modules.

• Criteria is being drafted at https://github.com/folio-org/tech-council/pull/98/files

0 min

Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates

All

Licensing group

• https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/TC/pages/1173782631

• We do have a list of acceptable licenses, the ASF 3rd-party licences.

  • The Licensing committee wants to have the list explicitly clear and without ambiguity.

  • The initials on the form represent who is tasked to investigate and determine the answer for a given question.

• Lazy consensus approved the list of questions (linked above).

TC Wiki Documentation

• Has upcoming meetings on the calendar (see the sub-group list page for dates).

1 min

GitHub RFCs

Wiki RFCs

All

Anything we need to discuss here?

1 min

Decision Log

All

• We need to discuss the distributed configuration timeline. Going from mod-configuration to mod-settings. RFC-0006. We extended the deprecation timeline to Umbrella Leaf. A Decision Record seems like the right place to do this. @Florian Gleixner : We can modify the Decision Record. I wanted to wait for the teams to give a timeline when they will be able to do the switch. But we can switch it if we decide to do it in Umbrella Leaf. → We will adapt the change in Umbrella Leaf.

25 min

Officially Supported Technologies (OST)

All

• https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/TC/pages/966852629/Umbrellaleaf

  • Docker. Whenever a new version is released, that version will be supported. We resolve this issue and do not specify a version.

  • Maven, Gradle, Make are development teams' decisions. Docker is a DevOps decision. It does not quite fit into this document.

  • Julian: We should treat Docker the same as Gradle and Make. There is a script that downloads the correct Gradle version. Olamide: We need to include the reasoning why we do not include versioning for Gradle and Make.

  • Maven vs. Maven extensions: They have different versions. We should leave extensions versions to the code owners.

  • Grails

  • Go: Julian: We should use Go 1.26 for Umbrellaleaf to cover the whole support period for Umbrellaleaf.

    • Wayne: Go. 1.26 is far in the Umbrellaleaf cycle. That might be a risk. Go skipped a release. If they skip again, Umbrellaleaf might not be covered.

    • 1.26 was set preliminarily. We will decide on Wednesday. We might be asking hosting providers if it is acceptable to take the risk.

  • Set Umbrellaleaf to Accepted (made change Today (Aug 25), but actual accepted date is Aug 20).

• Do we have a way of informing the community on new requirements (such as, for example, if we were to require a newer version of Postgresql)?

  • Could we inform SysOps and ask for feedback on this decision?

  • We may need to highlight notable changes to Ops, such as major infrastructure requirement changes.

• We want to use a newer version of Stripes (11.0, etc…) but that will only happen if we can get a newer version of React supported.

• POs have scope deadline of Aug 22

• We need to remember to update the recurring calendar after approving changes.

  • The next release, Vetch, should have the “next” date defined in the umbrellaleaf release page.

    • Is Umbrellaleaf release page missing? It might not be created yet.

NA

Zoom Chat

Tod Olson 10:56 AM
Must drop, thank you all. Will catch updates from the notes.

Christie Thomas (she/her) 10:59 AM
I have another meeting and need to drop as well.

kuss 11:01 AM
For me, end of November is fine

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:

1. Schema linting does not occur if the schemas are in YAML format.

2. 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.

1. 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

2. 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.