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2025-12-08 Meeting Notes

2025-12-08 Meeting Notes

Attendees

  • @Olamide Kolawole

  • @Ingolf Kuss

  • @Maccabee Levine

  • @Julian Ladisch

  • @Charlotte Whitt

  • @Wayne Schneider

  • @Christie Thomas

  • @Tod Olson

  • @Matt Weaver

  • @Jenn Colt

  • @Kevin Day

  • @Jeff Gerhard

  • @Craig McNally

  • @VBar

  • @Shelley Doljack

Time

Item

Who

Notes

Time

Item

Who

Notes

1 min

Scribe

 

@Florian Gleixner is followed by @Ingolf Kuss

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:

    • Licensing legal questions. Took to OLF. EBSCO offered to do internal review from in-house council, or external council (on EBSCO’s dime).

    • “Work on visibility of development requests / DIP proposal (PC)“

      • Alexis: Three subgroups working on this. DIP, community priorities dashboard, and PC roles/responsibilities related to release management.

    • Jenn subgroup starting 12/19 about metrics.

    • Line item contributions: lost some momentum, less likely to be done by end of calendar year. Should know by end of week if it can still progress, new concerns from EBSCO.

    • OLF looking at directory of applications. Could be unrelated to FOLIO, or FOLIO community could look at adopting it. Maybe invite Rachel Fadlon to present work done. External site, could be edited by software providers.

    • Tri-council in Thursday 1/22, 10am ET (PC timeslot). If PC oks.

    • Short meeting this morning. Licensing legal questions (see above)

  • PC: @Christie Thomas

    • Calendar calming proposal - considering proposals to reduce meeting burden across the FOLIO project.

    • Support SIG presented trends in support tickets and discussed options for analyzing data to provide insight on development needs.

    • Final charter is available for the working group on RMS/PC Roles, Relations and Communication -

      • Thinking also about roles that may be needed to support releases, such as a technical writer and QA lead.

      • Q: Don’t we already have a QA lead ?

  • RMS Group: @Jenn Colt

    • No meeting this week but note that PC is running a review of RMS. Seeing @Shelley Doljack 's question about release dates this week made me wonder if self-hosters are adequately represented in terms of communicating urgency of need around releases. Check in with PC group if you want to give feedback. Are the SysOps adequately represented in RMS ?

  • Security Team:

  • Eureka Early Adopters:  @Craig McNally:

5 min

Upcoming Meetings

All

 

  • Dec 8, 2025 - Regular TC meeting

  • Dec 10, 2025 - Eureka Update on Kong Gateway

  • Dec 15, 2025 - Regular TC meeting

  • Dec 17, 2025 - TBD

  • Dedicated Discussion Topics:

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

    • FOLIO API Standardization & Documentation

      • Surface current issues with API documentation and discoverability. API versioning ability and access by release/module?

      • Validation standards

      • API usage for bulk operations

      • Breaking changes notifications

        • Dedicated channel for breaking changes announcements (forwarded from #folio-development)

        • Tag breaking changes in Jira; auto-populate wiki page for external monitoring

    • Define FOLIO Core: Establish clear definition of what constitutes “core” FOLIO vs others.

      • what should integrate vs what needs to be in FOLIO

      • Simplification opportunities

    • Cost Reduction & Resource Optimizations

      • Sidecar proliferation

      • Kafka usage visibility and optimization

      • AWS cost analysis

    • wOLFcon Technical Track Planning: Proposal for technical conference track alongside general wolfcon. Ensure non-developer access

      • Format options: virtual conference, two-day technical overlay, hybrid

      • Employer outreach for developer/operations engineer participation

      • FOLIO contribution vehicle

    • Technology Visibility & Scanning: Automated scanning and reporting on FOLIO technology stack

      • leverage existing work by David Crossley

      • Language and framework scanning

      •  

  • Topics from Wolfcon sessions that could get into dedicated discussion

    • Folio “Core” definition

    • Estimating support costs

    • Getting People to contribute to Folio

    • Working costs of supporting modules

    • Costs of development environment (AWS)

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

10 min

TCR Board Review

All

  • Two new requests

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.

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

  • Existing Module Criteria has been merged:Create WIP criteria doc for existing module evals by maccabeelevine · Pull Request #98 · folio-org/tech-council

Selection of module reviewers by co-chairs : @Florian Gleixner +. @Ingolf Kuss
Perform evaluation

10 min

Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates

All

Mod-settings

1 min

GitHub RFCs

Wiki RFCs

All

 

0 min

Decision Log

All

No open items.

5 min

Officially Supported Technologies (OST)

Alls

Both Trillium and Umbrellaleaf need an update due to the delay:

10 min

Docker 29+ support on Jenkins

 

Enable Docker 29+ Support on Jenkins
Background
Recent Jenkins builds (example: FOLSPRINGS-204) are failing with:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Could not find a valid Docker environment…

The root cause is a compatibility gap between Docker 29+ (The Docker daemon in Engine v29 now enforces a minimum API version of 1.44 for client connections) and the versions of Testcontainers currently used in some modules:

  • Testcontainers < 2.0 does NOT support Docker 29+.

  • Testcontainers > 2.0 does NOT support Docker API versions < 1.44.

Additionally: Spring Boot 4.0 ships Testcontainers 2.0.2 by default, which requires Docker API 1.44+. This means any service upgrading to Spring Boot 4.0 will automatically depend on Testcontainers 2.x and therefore require Docker 29+.
Because Testcontainers maintainers do not plan backports for older versions (see issue #11212), this creates a strict upgrade requirement.
We currently rely on a temporary Surefire workaround forcing API version 1.44 (for cases when Testcontainers < 2.0 but Docker ≥ 29), which is not a long-term fix.
Why Jenkins Needs Docker 29+ Support

  • Jenkins AMIs and related tooling (docker-maven-plugin updated to 0.48.0) expect modern Docker versions.

  • Projects migrating to Testcontainers 2.x require Docker API 1.44+.

  • Without Docker 29+ on Jenkins, teams cannot upgrade to Testcontainers 2.x, and CI environments will continue to fail.

Proposed Solution

  1. Upgrade all Jenkins build nodes to Docker 29+: Ensures API 1.44 is available and compatible with Testcontainers ≥ 2.0.

  2. Upgrade modules relying on Testcontainers to version ≥ 2.0: This is the first Testcontainers version officially supporting Docker 29+.

  3. Remove temporary Surefire API overrides: Once both Docker and Testcontainers are aligned on API 1.44, custom properties are no longer needed.

Julian recommended that we transition backend modules to using Github Actions, what has been formerly done by Jenkins pipelines. David Crossley specifies what work has still to be done and when it is going to happen.

Response from FOLIO DevOps team:

Thanks, @PavloSmahin for raising the issue and helping to clarify the problem.

The bottom line: we really cannot upgrade the Jenkins build nodes to a higher version of the Docker API without addressing the larger issue of upgrading Jenkins itself and the OS of the Jenkins server and build nodes. This would likely be a very disruptive project and not very attractive in light of the long-planned migration of all backend CI workflows to Github Actions.

So we think that @julianladisch's suggestion is sound. We would propose that module developers continue to employ the short term workaround Pavlo refers to above until we can complete the work on the remaining Github Actions required to replace the existing Jenkins pipelines (some work has already been done), and then modules that require the newer Testcontainers can migrate to that workflow as part of their Spring 4.0 upgrade.

@david-crossley has agreed to further break down the work that is already captured in the FOLIO-4126 epic so that we can provide a better estimate of the effort required. We should be able to have that information by next week.

NA

Zoom Chat

 

Heute

Jenn Colt  an  Alle 17:14
I admit to only reading the summary, but it was great

Wayne Schneider  an  Alle 17:16
https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/REL/pages/5210256

Craig McNally 17:16
beat me to it :)

Craig McNally  an  Alle 17:16
Ebsconet = Thunderjet

Craig McNally  an  Alle 17:17
Dennis Bridges / Joe Reimers

Charlotte Whitt  an  Alle 17:19
The Linked Data app is in scope of Trillium

Maccabee Levine 17:32
Marty, you're not thinking fourth-dimensionally!

 

 



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.