2025-09-03 Meeting notes

2025-09-03 Meeting notes

 

Date

Sep 3, 2025 

Attendees 

Time

Item

Who

Notes

Time

Item

Who

Notes

1 min

Scribe

 

@Christie Thomas followed by @Shelley Doljack , @Jeff Gerhard skip @Christie Thomas

Reminder:  Please coTrillium release delayed untpy/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.

  • PC: @Christie Thomas

    • No meeting last week. (replaced by Tri-Council meeting.)

  • RMS Group:

    • Trillium release pushed back to next spring. No date yet.

    • When should we continue OST review given that Trillium has been pushed back? Revisit once a date for Trillium release is available.

  • Security Team:

  • 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):

    • Prepare for discussion of proposals at WolfCon.

  • 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.

5 min

Upcoming Meetings

All


0 min

TCR Board Review

All

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 Create WIP criteria doc for existing module evals by maccabeelevine · Pull Request #98 · folio-org/tech-council

Contact POs of modules
Selection of module reviewers by co-chairs : @Florian Gleixner +. @Ingolf Kuss people who volunteer and have not done it before. Need additional assigned, others moved to current module (these will be assigned once the modules are ready.)
Perform evaluation

10 min

Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates

All

Licensing group

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

  • Last week we shared the list of questions we're answering / documenting. TC agreed.

  • Subgroup researched and discussed some initial answers. Thanks to other TC members as well for supplying some valuable edits.

  • Two major open questions. LGPL licensed dependencies, working on some questions to CC and legal counsel. Various tools available and capabilities, working on questions to the developers of those tools. Then process.

  • We didn't ask TC yet for input on the answers, but fine to have input. Everyone's input is valuable. Strong opinions. Reasonable questions. We have a process that's been gradually improved but doesn't yet work well enough, why the subgroup exists. Please keep contributing as you like. Ask for patience and respect even if you think something has been answered already.

  • Q: Forking a third-party library? That might have been something unclear in the draft answers, subgroup not proposing to fork any libraries. Thanks for the question, patience please as we refine the draft.

  • Q: How to proceed with existing module evaluations? Do not delay this work waiting for the licensing group to finish its work, but do the best you can with the tools that are available and the process as is.

TC Wiki Documentation

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

  • Updates - Subgroup continues to meet and is ready to share the results.

  • [text file with proposed structure] - Will be posted in the Tech Council slack channel for comments.

  • High level sections:

    • Governance

    • technical Standards and Policies (includes OST)

    • Decision records

    • Archive

    • Technical Council Subgroups

    • RFC

    • Technical Reviews

    • Meeting notes

  • No new pages were created. Interpreted the scope as organizing what is already present. Future work could include expanding documentation and filling gaps.

1 min

GitHub RFCs

Wiki RFCs

All

 

15 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.

Need input on capacity before making any decisions on RFC-0006.

  • https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/TC/pages/1187348628

    • Starts with general availability (GA).

    • End determined by Technical Council based on support period of officially supported technologies.

    • Current release support periods end:

      • Ramsons support period ends Dec 31, 2025

      • Sunflower support period ends Jun 30, 2026

      • Trillium support period ends Dec 31, 2026

    • This proposal has not been presented anywhere else.

    • Concerns about acceptance by the community because of the reliance on CSPs.

    • Also noted that the support period for Ramsons may be impacted by the delay in the Trillium release.

    • Migrating from Ramsons to Sunflower is complex and is still under development for some providers and communities. There may not be a critical mass of implementers on Sunflower by the time the proposed support period ends.

    • RMS group should be consulted on this proposal.

5 min

Officially Supported Technologies (OST)

All

Create a communication plan for OST. “When we make changes to the OST, how do we inform the FOLIO community?”

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:

  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.