2024-07-15 Meeting notes

Translator


Date

Attendees 

Discussion items

TimeItemWhoNotes
1 minScribeAll
Jakub Skoczen  is next, followed by Jenn Colt
Florian Gleixner took notes

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.

5-10 minLiaison Updates
  • CC: Maccabee Levine
    • No CC Meeting this week
  • PC: Tod Olson
    • Kristin Martin rotating off as co-chair, need a new co-chair
    • Jeremy Huff will act as liaison from PC to TC (taking over from Owen Stevens)
    • Developer Advocate updates, largely reviewing developer documentation and working on developer mentorship program. Planning to interview Library of Australia to learn about their issues during onboarding
    • Acquisitions SIG is piloting a program for prioritizing issues, using JIRA voting (though concerned that "voting" may be interpreted as making development decisions as opposed to helping dev teams prioritize.
  • RMS Group: Jakub Skoczen 
    • meetings canceled until 7/29
  • Security Team: Craig McNally 
  • Tri-council Application Formalization: Jenn Colt  
    • No meeting last week
5 minRFC RetroAll

We had a productive retrospective last week, Several discussion topics were identified, which we need to allocate some time for...

Retro Board:

https://easyretro.io/publicboard/dY8fCRqguiSDP3wtvSLhNzlULdM2/1cf104bb-6aa4-4eb3-a878-0f9f1e235436

It's probably worth reviewing if you weren't present.

Continue RFC discussion again this Wednesday

Check in on action items:

  • DONE - Taras Spashchenko to incorporate the notion of review windows into the RFC Process documentation
  • DONE - Craig McNally to remove the Draft Refinement stage from the RFC Process documentation, make minor adjustments to language of RFC Prep and Public Review stages
  • DONECraig McNally to remove Draft Review PR metadata field from the RFC template
  • DONE - Craig McNallyJenn Colt to add the "adapt the RFC process to use the wiki" topic to an upcoming Wed. session
    • planned for  along with a couple other RFC-related topics.
  • DONE - Craig McNally to update the RFC Process documentation to highlight the importance of logging an official decision in the decision log upon the conclusion of the RFC. 


1 minUpcoming MeetingsAll
  •  - Dedication Discussion: RFC follow up continued
  •  - Regular TC Meeting
  •  - Dedicated Discussion: Topic TBD
  •  - Regular TC Meeting
  •  - Dedicated Discussion: Topic TBD
5-10 minTCR Board ReviewAll
  • Florian Gleixner - mod-reading-room: Meeting with development team. Got module and functionality presentation. Another meeting after evaluation is soon is planned.
  • Jenn Colt - ui-reading-room  - Jenn started evaluation.
  • TCR-43: mod-marc-migrations: Jeremy Huff will do the evaluation, Tod Olson and Jason Root will help.
5 min

Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates

All

Static Code Analysis: Ingolf Kuss is on vacation

Developer Documentation:

1 minRFCs

All

Reminder(s)

  • Go RFC still open - admin action required, only a PoC - nothing formal required other than closing the pull request.
  • Still Need Decision Log record for application formalization, Go, configuration RFCs
1 minDeveloper Advocate UpdatePatrick Pace (Unlicensed)

/wiki/spaces/DDG/pages/284327958

1 minDecision LogAll

Need to log decisions for the following:  (see above)

  • Decentralized configuration - Florian is working on this, will come back around next week. Write-up in draft
  • Go programming language
  • Application formalization - Craig will update next week


Time Permitting

Officially Supported Technologies (OST)

All

Check Recurring Calendar

Orchid has not been moved from Active to Archived - Fixed
Jenn Colt will look at the table, it appears to be broken. No Q, or R Folio releases on the table. - Fixed

5 minReference Data Upgrade

In the Sys Ops SIG meeting the topic of Reference Data Upgrades came up. The SIG thinks that the solution of this problem for mod-inventory-storage is not enough, but that this problem needs to be solved in a general way, for all modules.

There has been a long discussion 3-4 years ago about how FOLIO should handle reference data upon upgrades. See these links for background:



Notes:

Marc Johnson points out he remembers a difference set of formal processes for this from the previous subgroup

Jason R. asks if the issue is that you cannot specify per-module what type of data to load, or that no matter what is specified the upgrade process overrides it

Marc mentions that the proposal to correct this by Vince is a very involved and complex workflow. There has been no developer resources allocated to correct this issue and address the proposal

No easy solution to this problem because the original default data is lost to time and change

Will reach out to Julian Ladisch when he returns

Notes:

Ingolf Kuss is on vacation.  Lets wait until Julian and Ingolf are both here.


15minDeveloper Advocate ProposalsPatrick Pace (Unlicensed)

Patrick Pace (Unlicensed) explains the Proposal for the Strategy for Developer Documentation Group.

/wiki/spaces/DDG/pages/284327958

Comments:

  • Jeremy Huff next step would be finding volunteers
  • Tod Olson worth a try
  • Marc Johnson what happens when Patricks contract is not renewed
  • Patrick Pace (Unlicensed) Just starting the group, if the group gets the momentum, it will be a good start.
  • Marc Johnson We had 7 years now to get this running.
  • Maccabee Levine The proposal gives us the best opportunity
  • Marc Johnson Concern that the success depends on the developer advocate role.
  • Patrick Pace (Unlicensed) What could we do better?
  • Marc Johnson would have been better when this plan would have been here half a year ago, and the developer avdocate could be the one, that pushes the group.
  • Jeremy Huff This plan was not here and it was Patricks role to develop this plan. Chance, that the group will be successful without developer advocate is real.
  • Jenn Colt do we need to vote on this?

Accepted due to lazy consensus.

NAZoom Chat


00:18:03	Maccabee Levine:	Yup other folks were correct -- no requirement that the reviewer(s) include a TC member.  https://github.com/folio-org/tech-council/blob/master/NEW_MODULE_TECH_EVAL.MD#evaluation
00:22:35	Root, Jason M:	Reacted to "Yup other folks were..." with 👍
00:22:45	Patrick Pace:	Group Long-Term Strategy And Transition Plan Proposal - Developer Documentation Group - FOLIO Wiki (atlassian.net)
00:41:19	Maccabee Levine:	Apologies that I have to drop off at 11:50.  I support the proposal at offer here.  I share Marc's concern (and raised it at the subgroup), but I feel this organization gives us the best chance at trying to make it work.  And we are getting continuous indication that better documentation is needed.

Topic Backlog

Decision Log ReviewAll

Review decisions that are in progress.  Can any of them be accepted?  rejected?

Translation SubgroupAllSince we're having trouble finding volunteers for a subgroup, maybe we can make progress during a dedicated discussion session?
Communicating Breaking ChangesAll

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 - UpkeepAll

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 VisibilityAll

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 modulesAll

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 TemplatesAll

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.
Java 21All

https://folio-project.slack.com/archives/CAQ7L02PP/p1713445764285349


Is Tech Council considering to update to java 21, I head good things from Netflix engineering teams about Garbage collector
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/netflix-java/ (edited)

Proposed Mod KafkaAll

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.

Action Items