2025-09-08 Meeting notes

1 min

Scribe

@Shelley Doljack followed by @Jeff Gerhard

Reminder:  Please take attendance. Please 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:

  • Peter shared the licensing subgroup's work, draft questions for CC needing legal consult. For discussion by CC at WOLFcon.

  • Planning of WOLFcon shoulder meeting topics.

• PC: @Christie Thomas

  • General concern raised about about Ramsons support timeline in recent TC proposal given Trillium being pushed back to Spring 2026.

  • Community Priorities - Data Import and ERM

  • Continuing discussion of the software development proposals on Slack. Interest in synthesizing the three proposals into one given strong overlap in all of them.

• RMS Group:

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

  • Discussion of Sunflower patches to get NLS features out by November so they can go live in March

• Security Team:

  • Discussion about fixing Stripes dependencies with vulnerabilities. Contacted the Stripes development team about possible solutions.

• Eureka Early Adopters:  @Craig McNally:

  • Latest status updates can be found here , spreadsheet there is up-to-date

  • Meeting every other week now.

  • https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FOLIJET/pages/1190428721/KONG-34+POC+-+Building+Kong+from+source?atl_f=PAGETREE

  • https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FOLIJET/pages/1203601409

• Community Driven Development (@Jenn Colt / @Maccabee Levine):

  • Prep for Wolfcon

• Wolfcon Prep

  • Chairs meet today and will work on tri-council agenda. Any requests?

5 min

Upcoming Meetings

All

• Sep 8, 2025 - Regular TC meeting

• Sep 10, 2025 - OST (node.js runtime; how to know what needs to be in the OST)

  • Update sonarsource/sonarqube-scan-action digest to 1a6d90e by renovate[bot] · Pull Request #86 · folio-org/fqm-tools

• Dedicated Discussion Topics:

  • https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/x/VQBTR

• Security team DR for support periods- Sep 17, 2025

• Discussion Notes:

  • Security Team has had discussions on the breaking changes practices but no formal approval.

  • Should we prioritize the breaking changes best practices draft sooner based on the Security team's discussion? Is it urgent from the Security team’s perspective?

  • Other councils are proposing it as a TC proposal but we haven't discussed it yet.

  • The Ramsons extended support might have an impact on it.

  • There are two perspectives of it: security and maintenance, so we should have a dedicated meeting on the schedule to get more feedback.

  • We'll put the https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/x/VQBTR discussion on the schedule for next Wednesday

0 min

TCR Board Review

All

• https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/TCR-56

• Discussion Notes:

  • Some questions regarding our criteria. It seems like ui-mosaic is formally failing the criteria: “Assigned to exactly one application descriptor within the FOLIO Community LSP Platform, specified in the Jira task for this module evaluation (3, 5)" Shouldn't mod-mosaic be listed as optional or a dependency? Some confusion about the declaration in the platform-descriptor.json in platform-lsp repo.

  • app-mosaic is in the e-testing environment. Not sure how Kitfox is building this. They may or may not be using the platform-lsp repo.

  • The criteria was meant to be easily-actionable. Is it not?

  • A module cannot belong to 2 applications at once. Is this a chicken and egg problem?

  • What's the motivation to submit an app if it won't be part of the community platform?

  • Any kind of confusion with what's supposed to be in which application or another one confuses and annoys system operators trying to setup an environment.

  • Question about this criteria: Use the Stripes version of referred on the [Officially Supported Technologies](https://wiki.folio.org/display/TC/Officially+Supported+Technologies) page[^1] (10, 16)How should this be delcared in the module?

  • In this case, it is using the Sunflower version which is Stripes 10.0 or greater.

  • Question about the licenses. For this evaluation, we are using the existing process for license evaluation.

  • A dependency is a dependency and it shouldn't matter if it is peer or first-party.

  • Where are we supposed to look now for PC decisions on apps? The functionality evaluated by the PC wiki page hasn’t been updated since Jan 2025. Are we supposed to look at the jira dashboard? Maccabee will reach out to PC.

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

• Discussion Notes:

  • Olamide hit roadblock with mod-copycat. We have a frontend module but currently no backend module. He will select another backend module from the spreadsheet and reach out to the PO.

10 min

Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates

All

Licensing: developing 2 sets of questions for PC and Security team. Best tools for license evalution. Some questions about sungrep(?). Is the licensing eval under the purview of the security team or was it coincidence that they were using sungrep to look at licenses ?

Documentation: We will meet this Wednesday to discuss the feedback for the IA shared last meeting in Slack. Please provide feedback if you haven't already.

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

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

NA

Zoom Chat

09:12:42 From Jason Root to Everyone:
Kong Spike: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/KONG-33

09:13:29 From Jason Root to Everyone:
Replying to "Kong Spike: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FOLIJET/pages/1203601409 ":
I thought @Shelley Doljack may be interested considering the active work her team is doing. 🙂

09:13:59 From Shelley Doljack to Everyone:
Replying to "Kong Spike: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse...":
I just joined. Kong alternative? sheesh

09:15:42 From Craig McNally to Everyone:
Replying to "Kong Spike: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse...":
potentially... hopefully not

09:17:53 From Craig McNally to Everyone:
Replying to "Kong Spike: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse...":
Also relevant: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FOLIJET/pages/1190428721
Jason Root:👍

09:20:40 From Craig McNally to Everyone:
Replying to "Kong Spike: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse...":
ICYMI Eureka team is looking at both approaches... Looking at potential alternatives, as well as sticking with Kong and seeing what would be involved in building from source, required support/maintenance work, etc. It's important that we have the full picture.
Jason Root:👍

09:36:09 From Christie Thomas (she/her) to Everyone:
It was verbally approved, so I think they are just behind in updating documentation.
Tod Olson:👍

09:36:38 From Tod Olson to Everyone:
Replying to "It was verbally approved, so I think they are just...":
And perhaps need a reminder about change management for this process.

09:36:41 From Craig McNally to Everyone:
Kitfox confirmed that they presently do not use the platform-lsp to build the eureka-based rancher envs. They do have plans to start using this, but don't have an ETA on that.

09:42:41 From Julian Ladisch to Everyone:
FOLIO Recordings | Open Library Foundation

09:42:57 From Day, Kevin to Everyone:
Specifically for TC:
Tech Council (FOLIO) | FOLIO Meeting Recordings

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.