2024-07-22 Meeting notes

1 min

Scribe

All

@Marc Johnson is next, followed by @Ingolf Kuss (on vacation until Aug 2, 2024), then skip @Julian Ladisch as he filled in on Jul 17, 2024 

@Maccabee Levine will take notes today.

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 min

Liaison Updates

@Maccabee Levine

@Tod Olson

@Jakub Skoczen

@Craig McNally

@Jenn Colt 

• CC: @Maccabee Levine

  • Welcome to new members. Stephen Pampell (TAMU) volunteered as liaison to TC. Shawn Nicholson (Michigan State) volunteered (prior to meeting) as CC member of AWS Cost Review Group.

  • Developer advocate role. Jeremy summarized work so far. Several members spoke positively. CC will look at budget. Want PC and TC to weigh in on renewal ahead of next CC meeting 8/12.

• PC: @Tod Olson

  • Asia/Pacific-friendly meeting (2024-07-18 Product Council Agenda and Meeting Notes (Quarterly Asia Pacific Friendly Time Zone meeting)

  • FOLIO Roadmap and Prioritization Update

  • Circled back to Topics from China Community, February 2024

    • China community on forked version of Goldenrod, would like to come current

• RMS Group: @Jakub Skoczen 

  • meetings canceled until 7/29

• Security Team: @Craig McNally 
  
  

  • Update on candidates for joining the security team:

    • Met with @Jens Heinrich again.  Need to sync up with @Kevin Day.

    • Will likely be seeking formal approval from the TC soon.

• Tri-council Application Formalization: @Jenn Colt  

  • No meeting last week.  Back on this week.

1 min

Upcoming Meetings

All

• Jul 24, 2024 - Dedicated Discussion: RFC Wiki use

• Jul 29, 2024 - Regular TC Meeting

• Jul 31, 2024 - Dedicated Discussion: Officially Supported Technologies

• Aug 5, 2024 - Regular TC Meeting

5-10 min

TCR Board Review

All

• @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 expects progress this week.

5 min

Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates

All

Static Code Analysis

• No update

Developer Documentation

• Meeting each week.  Patrick laying out the proposals well to be addressed.

1 min

RFCs

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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

15 min

Contribution Model and Best Practices Proposal

@Patrick Pace (Unlicensed)

From Slack:

Hi TC,

Can I request a 15-minute block of time for this coming Monday's meeting?

On behalf of the documentation subgroup, I'll propose a contribution model and best practices for community contributions to developer documentation. This is intended as a conceptual framework and not practical documentation, so to speak. That is, this document won't go in our documentation, but if approved, its propositions will be used for building such.

Please review the following in preparation for the proposal. And if you have any questions or anything, please let me or any member of the subgroup know. And feel free to comment on the document.

Contribution Model and Best Practices Proposal

• Contribution Model.  @Patrick Pace (Unlicensed): If approved, the model will inform other aspects of documentation, like the platform choice.  Encourage "courageous, healthy and productive communal contribution".  Based on Wikipedia's contribution model, not a copy but good place to start for OSS docs.  "We should be bold in editing", with enough people contributing it will end up being good over time.  Fluidity: continuing to evolve.  Cooperation, FOLIO already has a good culture of this.  Strategy: platform allowing for discussion, versioning and attribution; community needs to know about the model and how to contribute.  Best practices on editing, creating new documents.

  • Approved by lazy consensus

• @Marc Johnson Where will the output of the documentation group live – policies, processes, etc.?

  • @Patrick Pace (Unlicensed) No strategy on that yet, but the Developer Documentation Group space will continue to exist, it will live there.

15 min

Platform Comparisons, Platform Proposal

@Julian Ladisch

From Slack:

Yesterdaythe developer documentation group decided on Confluence as documentation platform (Platform Comparisons,Platform Proposal- still rough draft -). The actual documentation work cannot start until the TC has approved this decision. To remove this blocker as early as possible I suggest to put this on Monday's agenda even if the proposal document is still in rough draft status.

Platform Proposal

• @Patrick Pace (Unlicensed):  Documentation specific to modules should remain at GitHub.  Dynamic Documentation to remain at dev.folio.org, untill we determine that Confluence can house them and they can be moved.  Create a new Developer Manual in confluence.  Link the platforms as appropriate.

  • Structure of the Developer Manual to be proposed next week.  But will include general documentation that already exists, and new general documentation that is created.

  • Considered dev.folio, docs.folio, and Confluence.  Not proposing a single platform, because modules make sense at GitHub, and dynamic documentation seemed to need to remain at dev.folio, although that may turn out to be possible to migrate – at worst, we would like to it.

  • Why Confluence?  Just better for facilitating community contribution.  Developers can manage GitHub, but for any non-developer contribution, you would need specialists.  Reduce obstacles as much as possible.  Also:

    • Part of Atlassian, integration with Jira etc.

    • Precedence in community for documentaing htere.

    • Mature technology

    • Designed for community contribution

    • Lower overhead, no additional DevOps infrastructure.

  • Main caveats: existing developer documentation may remain at dev.folio.  Also dev.folio search includes GitHub content, that may not be possible in Confluence.

• @Jeremy Huff Theoretically dev.folio.org is open to community contributions via GitHub, but historically it has not worked out like that.  From conversation with @David Crossley, just a few individuals over the years have contributed.

• @Marc Johnson

  • First, the dynamic documentation really doesn't below with the manual.  Two very different forms of documentation, only together per historical convenience.  Not very important to have them together.  Very different purpose.  Dynamic docs are for developers or sysops to know how the existing modules work.  Frustration with existing situation.  Different purpose to if you are developing something in FOLIO, guidelines on how you would do it.  There is a grabbag of docs on how to run the virtual boxes etc., that belongs somewhere else than how to develop stuff.

  • Re: concerns of people not doing anything with the dev.folio website, that's because there has not been encouragement to do so.  How we do that is presumably another part of the plan.

  • What would the transition plan be?  FOLIO has a history of making change decisions and then not having the capacity / priority to actually do it.  Causes significant drag in some areas, like two different doc specification technologies and two different frameworks.  Don't want to end up in the same position for this documentation.

  • Nice that these proposals are coming through in manageable chunks.  We might have similar challenges to Eureka with packaging stuff into small pieces, might be hard to be cohesive at the end.

  • Seems slightly odd that as a technical audience we're moving to a wiki and may want non-technical folks involved, and yet product documentation folks actively chose not to use a wiki and to train people to produce that documentation.  Worth considering overall cohesion.  Don't know if regular releases will be part of this documentation plan.

• @Patrick Pace (Unlicensed) 

  • Re: dynamic documentation, this gets into the structure proposal coming up.  Will be linked to in the references section of the manual, not the main content.  Could make adjustments to incoordinate it directly, but if not, should just be named in the manual / indicate that it exists.

  • Transition plan?  There is a plan being developed (#8 Documentation Consolidation Plan).  This will be a big project, will need to have enough gas in the tank to keep it going.  Can't put everything on one person like David Crossley, so it can continue to live until it's done.  But still being developed.

  • How do we know if it's cohesive?  List of lots of pieces and how they fit together.  The Proposals document.  They do depend on each other.  TC approving one means we can move onto the next.  Lots of connections between them.  

  • Docs WG not using the wiki?  Didn't talk to the Docs group about that but did talk to David Crossley, and the wiki didn't exist when they started dev.folio, and someone else chose that platform, David inherited it. 

    • The Releases capability of docs.folio, how do we handle that for developer documentation?  If needed, could package it up.

• @Craig McNally If the dev site searches GitHub (and maybe the wiki also), there might be a Confluence plug-in that does something similar.

  • @Jeremy Huff  agrees.

• @Maccabee Levine agrees the proposals are cohesive, and with Patrick's other answers.

• Approved by lazy consensus.

1 min

Decision Log

All

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

• Message to channels about RFCs.  Due end of next week.  @Craig McNally and @Jenn Colt will confer about posting to the listed channels.  Maybe find automation.

Time Permitting

Reference Data Upgrade

@Ingolf Kuss

@Jason Root

@Craig McNally

@Marc Johnson

@Julian Ladisch

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:

• Original problem statement

• Input from SysOps SIG

• Proposals considered by Tech Council working group

• Recommendation from Tech Council working group

Previous 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.

Today:

• @Maccabee Levine Is this the same as the PC subgroup working to improve sample data?
  
  

  • @Marc Johnson Not sure.

  • @Tod Olson Thought we were taking about the same thing as the group a lot of people were on for a while.

  • @Craig McNally Reference data working group a couple years ago is what sysops is taking about.  Not sure if it's the same as the sample data group.

  • @Tod Olson Was much more involved the last time.

  • @Maccabee Levine Just make sure the two groups are aware of each other.

• When @Ingolf Kuss returns, can get more info.

• @Tod Olson This new PC group is about sample data.  Years ago data was contributed.  Now new functionality, there are no sample data test cases.

• @Maccabee Levine Example, in snapshot there are no orders connected to any invoices.

• @Tod Olson Reference data can be customized (i.e. material types) or added to, but often is not.  Some stable conventions are needed for the reference environments.  It's a fuzzy boundary.

  • @Craig McNally System data is a third category.

NA

Zoom Chat

Marc Johnson  to  Everyone 11:41 AM
I’m comfortable linking to / raising the awareness of the dynamic documentation

My concern was intermingling the two

Huff, Jeremy T  to  Everyone 11:45 AM
I believe David took it over from Nassib Nassar

Julian Ladisch  to  Everyone 11:34 AM
Dynamic documentation is out of scope of this proposal:

Julian Ladisch 11:34 AM
"Existing Dynamic Documentation: At the moment, Source map, API, and Endpoint documents are best left at dev.folio.org."

Marc Johnson 11:40 AM
It was specifically mentioned that even though it was being left, the intent was to later migrate it if possible, and it not to heavily link and style them similarly

That decision was in scope of this. Was that an incorrect interpretation?

Julian Ladisch 11:47 AM
We know that Confluence has page upload APIs but we haven't evaluated whether moving dynamic documentation to Confluence yields usable pages. This evaluation is out of scope of the platform proposal.

You  to  Everyone 11:55 AM
https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PC/pages/298647579/Better+Sample+Data+in+FOLIO+Test+Environments+Working+Group
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18DZCx1qYhRTvgi1eRFfvd1qNP95OQFF9Q0-gzV66ki0/edit#heading=h.xiz4ytjbca90

Marc Johnson  to  Everyone 12:00 PM
And then you get odd examples, like baseline circulation rules

Craig McNally 12:01 PM
mandatory for the system to behave correctly.

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:

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.

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 21

All

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 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.