2024-07-29 Meeting notes

Date

29 Jul 2024

Attendees

Discussion items

Time	Item	Who	Notes
1 min	Scribe	All	Maccabee Levine will scribe Marc Johnson is next, followed by Ingolf Kuss (on vacation until 02 Aug 2024), then skip Julian Ladisch as he filled in on 17 Jul 2024 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 No meeting this week. PC: Tod Olson WOLFcon planning & SIG updates Craig McNally will confirm whether individual council meetings are on Friday morning vs afternoon. RMS Group: Jakub Skoczen Not present. Security Team: Craig McNally Later in agenda Tri-council Application Formalization: Jenn Colt Wayne Schneider presented and discussed dependency graphs last week.
1 min	Upcoming Meetings	All	31 Jul 2024 - Dedicated Discussion: Officially Supported Technologies 05 Aug 2024 - Regular TC Meeting 07 August 2024 Dedicated Discussion: RFC retro part 'n' and Tod Olson's suggestion Regular TC Meeting
5-15 min	TCR Board Review	All	Florian Gleixner - mod-reading-room: Met with development team. Impetus was LOC, to control access to the reading rooms for individual users. Self-evaluation was correct, nothing wrongly checked. Logs are kept without expiration date. EU GDPR would not support this, should be documented. Legal issue, not technical. Recommend possibility to clear the logs, or to not record them. Send that recommendation to the development team. Craig McNally Makes sense to document this and create a UX-PROD to address. And if it should be handled for all modules, should be added to criteria for all modules, not just this one. Jenn Colt Privacy SIG has been quiet, but PC could ask them to take this up. Should be part of the product. Jens Heinrich This should be documented in the personal data disclosure form. And maybe that should be enhanced with timescales info, i.e. the timing of how long the data is stored. Maccabee Levine Agree it passes the TC criterion since the disclosure form is accurate. It's a product issue if we want timescale reported or changed. Jeremy Huff Agree. But it's not an accident that this came up in a technical review, privacy sometimes requires technical investigation. Interplay between TC and PC, not sure what that would look like. TC voted, module approved. Jenn Colt - ui-reading-room . Working on it, no update yet, will have on soon. TCR-43: mod-marc-migrations: Jeremy Huff Planning to make headway this week
5 min	Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates	All	Developer Docs proposal later on agenda Jeremy Huff Going well thanks to Patrick's productivity.
1 min	RFCs	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
10 min	Security Team Personnel changes	Craig McNally	The Security Team is seeking formal approval to add Jens Heinrich and Kevin Day as members. Jens Heinrich Works at IdM working group for German FOLIO project. Designing how to sync FOLIO and current identity solutions. Moving from implementing work to mostly security. Security critical for libraries and libraries for universities. Craig McNally Jens was also participated in API fuzzing to discover vulnerability, by network security operations group. Jens Heinrich Modern tooling expects OpenAPI spec not RAML. Got stuck behind higher priorities but could start again with conversion to OpenAPI spec. Also on GDPR conformity part of HEBIS. Craig McNally Kevin Day (TAMU) has been a full-stack dev. Workflow, camunda modules. Jeremy Huff He is tech lead for the workflow work. Work at TAMU not just FOLIO. Very security-minded, involved in different technical communities' security concerns. TC approved new personnel by lazy consensus.
15 min	Proposed structure for developer manual	Patrick Pace	/wiki/spaces/DDG/pages/283934733 Patrick Pace If approved, it will serve as the initial form. Planned to be fluid. But should be logical & organized so a new developer could read through the manual, be ready to develop. Veteran can find exactly what they're looking for rather than only depending on search. Logical progression of major sections Introduction to FOLIO. Expectation of a development background, but not FOLIO. How to Use This Manual. And how to contribute. Accessing the FOLIO Toolstack. Core Technical Concepts (4) and Advanced Technical Concepts (6) have balancing. But the idea is not to get deep very quick. Have conceptual stuff precede the practical stuff. Development in Practice. I.e. style guide. Finding an issue, starting to contribute. Advanced Technical Topics. All the detail we want. So developers can do so "well". Tips, Tutorials, Examples and Templates. Building on the technical details. Things that can be re-used. Reference. Like source code map, API documentation. Appendices. Anything that doesn't have a place elsewhere. Jens Heinrich First section is about FOLIO as a project? Patrick Pace. Yes. Mostly links, not duplicating. Jens Heinrich People might expect an architectural introduction there. Patrick Pace Maybe renaming Core Technical Concepts to be clear it's the architectural introduction. Jeremy Huff Add the word 'project' to #1, i.e. "introduction to the FOLIO project" Jeremy Huff The version of FOLIO that the document relates to should be clear. Patrick Pace Functional docs group does that, so precedence. Need input on that. Jens Heinrich How much of the documentation is release dependent? Seems not much. Only 6 and upwards very dependent on the release. Jeremy Huff Esp with application formalization, sections 4-6 may change a lot. Maccabee Levine Suggest focus on the current version, perhaps callouts / sidebars with "Prior to release X, something different". Jeremy Huff Does TC need a process in place for significant changes to the manual in the future? Patrick Pace Hopefully there will continuously be incidental changes. Dev documentation group would have regular reviews. Jenn Colt Comfortable accepting this, knowing it can evolve and dev documentation group can manage the changes. 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	Hold until after Aug 2. 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

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: Schema linting does not occur if the schemas are in YAML format. 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. 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 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 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.

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