2026-01-21 Meeting Notes

1 min

Scribe

@Kevin Day is followed by @Shelley Doljack

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:

  • No meeting this week

• PC: @Christie Thomas

  • Discussed PC-TC pipeline from app endorsement through the TCR process. Will return to how the PC can engage with POs earlier in the process and communicate endorsements to the TC.

    • @Maccabee Levine : How does the TC know whether or not to review?

      • This part needs to be returned to for further discussion. For now make the best decisions we can.

    • @Wayne Schneider : Mod-linked-data-import is a good example case. TC should note on any existing functionality vs new functionality.

      • Does the module need to be presented to the PC (it was not yet done)?

      • What needs to happen before a TCR is filled out?

      • We need to pay attention to PC’s processes and make sure we (the TC) do not try to approve something that has not yet been reviewed and approved by the PC.

      • As a reminder, the PC doesn’t want to endorse Modules and instead want to endorse Apps.

      • The line between new endorsements and existing endorsements is unclear at this time.

      • Summary: Linked Data has been endorsed, mod-linked-data-import falls under that umbrella.

        • This is the PCs opinion, given the information they had at that time.

    • @Jenn Colt The PC is wanting less information.

      • The PC uses “endorse” rather than “approve”.

      • The PC doesn’t want to endorse at the code level.

  • Once an app has been endorsed by the PC, no further review and endorsement by the PC is required for modules that provide the functionality of the app unless there are changes to or an expansion of end-user functionality or the UI.

  • mod-linked-data-import is covered by the Linked Data App endorsement.

  • Martin Scholz will be presenting on the Community developed functionality around Folio at the FOLIO Implementers SIG on January 27 and at Sys-Ops in February.

  • [Add list of potential sources for community developed functionality]

• RMS Group:

  • Cancelled this week.

• Security Team:

  • Business as usual.

• Eureka Early Adopters:  @Craig McNally:

  • https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FOLIJET/pages/1278476307

  • Current blocker for GBV: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/EUREKA-841

5 min

Upcoming Meetings

All

• Jan 21, 2026 - Regular TC meeting (even though it’s Wednesday)

• Jan 22, 2026- Reminder: Tri Council Meeting, using PC zoom.

• Jan 26, 2026 - Regular TC meeting

• Jan 28, 2026 - 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

• https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/TCR-60

  • @Ingolf Kuss Likely finishing up eval this week with Florian.

  • @Florian Gleixner : There was confusion regarding why there is a re-evaluation.

    • This raised concerns on whether or not the module is officially supported.

  • @Ingolf Kuss : Re-evaluation resulted in some failures due to changes in criteria and the responsible team are disagreeing with making changes.

    • They asked us to inform the POs if we (the TC) changes the requirements.

    • There is confusion regarding the new ENV Vars requirements needing to be applied to existing modules.

      • We should not apply this to existing, approved, modules regarding the ENV Vars requirements.

      • We should ideally add notes to the TCR regarding the discussions on re-evaluation (questions, concerns, conversations).

• https://folio-org.atlassian.net/browse/TCR-59

  • @Julian Ladisch : approved by PC two years ago, but not this specific module. Do we need fresh PC approval?

    • No new progress, should have an update on Monday.

  • @Christie Thomas will ask 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.

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

• Existing Module Criteria has been merged:https://github.com/folio-org/tech-council/pull/98/files

10 min

Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates

All

Zero active subgroups

1 min

GitHub RFCs

Wiki RFCs

All

0 min

Decision Log

All

5 min

Officially Supported Technologies (OST)

Alls

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

• https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/TC/pages/730891059/Trillium

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

• Spring Boot versions:

• Trillium: Spring Boot 4.0, end-of-life 2026-12-31

• Umbrellaleaf: Spring Boot 4.1, end-of-life 2027-06-30

• This is likely too short

• If the Trillium release date will be in May 2026 there is enough time to migrate to Spring Boot 4.1 for Trillium because the Spring Boot people publish the Spring Boot 4.1 milestone releases in January 2026, for details see https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FOLIJET/pages/1163264001/Migration+to+Spring+Boot+4.1#Why-snapshot%2C-milestone-and-release-candidate-versions%3F

• Offer next two Wednesdays for RMS attendance at a TC discussion. Request in RMS channel. TC representatives could also attend an RMS meeting to discuss.

• @Jenn Colt : Avoid use of snapshot releases. Ensure that we have a CSP organized around the dates.

  • The snapshots can cause confusion, such as if problems are introduced but are later resolved during official releases.

  • It will be easier to do everything once.

  • We need to make others outside the TC aware about the CSP plans.

  • There will not be an extra bugfest following Spring Boot 4.0 to 4.1.

  • We also changed Kafka.

• For Kafka, we need to ensure all of the environments are on the correct version, but this doesn’t necessarily block the development.

  • Some tests need to update their Kafka version used during the testing process.

• @Wayne Schneider Vert.x 5 is already out, we should update/correct/clarify this.

• Spring-Boot is updated to 4.0 for GA and 4.1 for release.

• Kafka can stay at 4.2.

• We moved from Jenkins to GitHub Actions.

  • Spring modules must use GitHub Actions by Trillium.

  • The Go module is already using GitHub Actions.

  • Vert.x modules should also move.

  • @Wayne Schneider : The requirement (or not) to move GitHub Actions is more of a CI concern than a development concern. If we move everything to the GitHub Actions, then this will reduce cost and allow us to scale back things.

  • Jenkins will still be around during Trillium, so we should still note the use of Jenkins is still supported.

    • @Julian Ladisch Emphasizes that we should make moving from Jenkins to GitHub Actions a requirement and save money.

    • @Wayne Schneider We are currently creating tickets to help people move, but not all at once. The current GitHub Actions code is not well tested and we should migrate slowly.

      • Moving Spring modules is as quick as possible due to the Spring Boot 4.0 requirements.

      • There is existing documentation in place to help assist with this migration, such as the FOLIO .github repo and specifically see the README-maven.md.

  • Sunflower CSPs still need to use the Jenkins pipeline.

• maven GitHub actions workflow for build and deploy has been released on 2026-01-19: https://github.com/folio-org/.github/releases/tag/v1.11.0 This was a blocker for Oleksii Petrenko to discuss Spring Boot 4.1.

• Spring Boot 4.1 does NOT require snapshot versions because FOLIO migrates away from OpenFeign to Spring HTTP Service Clients, for details see https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FOLIJET/pages/1163264001

• There are 3 options:

  • Use Spring Boot 4.0, limit Trillium support period to 2026-12-31.

  • Use Spring Boot 4.0, after Trillium GA release migrate from Spring Boot 4.0 to 4.1, and run a second bug fest.

  • Use Spring Boot 4.1, the first milestone is expected next week.

NA

Zoom Chat

Wayne Schneider 10:11 AM
@Christie Thomas (she/her) you are the liaison, after all, not a rep of the PC!

Jenn Colt 10:11 AM
It’s extremely confusing that they want less information

Wayne Schneider 10:17 AM
Certainly adding a module seems like a significant change to the scope of an application

Jenn Colt 10:17 AM
Thank you for all this Christie

Julian Ladisch 10:18 AM
For the PC approval of linked data there was a presentation with the list of modules. That list did NOT include mod-linked-data-import.

Julian Ladisch 10:19 AM
The presentation https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ouufRa276miGORBBrNIATFkYfEkD-Ibs/edit?slide=id.p10#slide=id.p10 doesn't mention mod-linked-data-import.

Christie Thomas (she/her) 10:19 AM
Thank you for that context! I did not know that either.
I will take this back to the PC.

Ingolf Kuss 10:26 AM
https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/TC/pages/1400274946/DR-000044+-+Environment+Variables
Ingolf Kuss 10:34 AM
https://github.com/folio-org/tech-council/pull/115

Kevin Day 10:49 AM
Is this it?
https://github.com/folio-org/.github

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.