2024-10-07 Meeting notes

Date

Attendees 

Discussion items

TimeItemWhoNotes
1 minScribeAll

Maccabee Levine is next, followed by Craig McNally

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
      No PC meeting last week.
  • RMS Group:
    • Jakub not here
  • Security Team: 
    • Nothing
  • Tri-council Application Formalization:  
    • No meeting.
1 minUpcoming MeetingsAll
  • - Regular TC meeting - Include Developer Advocate Update
  • - Dedicated discussion: Sunflower OST moving to Accepted.  Issue is Jenkins java version.
  • -  Regular TC meeting
  • - Dedicated discussion: ?
  •   - Regular TC meeting
  • - Dedicated discussion: TCR 44
15 minTCR Board ReviewAll

Today:

  • Need approval of TCR-42
    • Only issue last time was waiting for PC approval; that has now happened.
    • No end-to-end tests provided, so that doesn't violate criteria.
    • Approved by lazy consensus.

TCR-43: mod-marc-migrations

TCR-45 mod-record-specifications

  • Ingolf Kuss Finished the review, all criteria fulfilled except snapshot version dependence.  Dev lead said they will change that dependency before flower release.
  • There is a pull request #76 to change that TCR criteria.   
    • Marc Johnson We currently have a disagreement on whether/what to change in the criteria.  Ingolf recommends we approve the TCR regardless.  Marc recalls TC preferring that we decide on the PR first.
      • Maccabee Levine Agree we should decide the PR before the TCR.  Started the conversation several times, there may be disagreement, but need to make a decision.
    • Julian Ladisch disagrees with softening the criterion, prefers to remove it entirely.
    • Marc Johnson it's there because it was originally desired.
    • Jenn Colt Criteria that requires the reviewer to make a subjective judgement are difficult, would rather remove the criterion.
    • Marc Johnson Given that using snapshot dependencies is common practice, does anyone feel strongly enough to oppose ditching the criteria entirely?
      • No objections raised.
    • Change accepted without disagreement.  Ingolf Kuss merged the PR and will change the other related file as well.
  • Back to TCR-45.  Ingolf recommends acceptance.  No objections.
    • Approved by lazy consensus.

TCR-44

  • Craig McNally First part is deciding about Go lang.  Second is approval of mod-reporting.
  • Maccabee Levine Jakub suggested "I think there should be a presentation to the TC from DevOps regarding issues (or lack thereof) related to supporting Go in CI/CD and FOLIO deployments.", and then ok to to the TCR in parallel.
    • No disagreement on process.
    • Marc Johnson Should review this decision next time we review processes.
  • Julian Ladisch will do the TCR review of TCR-44.
  • Need presentation from DevOps.
    • Jakub Skoczen Maybe we should structure discussion about the criteria.
    • Craig McNally Agree.  Ask Julian to go through criteria, identify which items require discussion.
    • Marc Johnson Agree but suggest we say beforehand things that we know will fail.  Some gaps already known.
  • Jenn Colt Let Julian get started on this, then note in Slack when we want to use a Wednesday discussion to talk about it.  Or schedule now.
    • Craig McNally We should schedule now, within timebox for initial review.  Wed 10/23 for review.

Last time:

mod-reporting, a Go rewrite of mod-ldp, has been submitted. As Go is not yet supported it requires work regarding static code checks, code coverage automation, etc.

We should first complete the existing TCR requests.


Should we merge the PR that removes the snapshot criterium from our module acceptance criterium? This will solve the issue with the TCR.

Depending on a SNAPSHOT version is bad practice. Maven rejects a release when trying to release a module with SNAPSHOT dependency. It is also bad practice during development because the build is not reproducible. However, as FOLIO libraries are provided as SNAPSHOT version only the modules are forced to use SNAPSHOT versions during development.

When merging the PR we can appove the submitted module without explaining why we overwrite the SNAPSHOT criterium.

Instead of removing the SNAPSHOT criterium it should be a requirement that can be ignored if reasonably justified.

A warning not to use a SNAPSHOT dependency is in the module release documentation for maven based modules: https://dev.folio.org/guidelines/release-procedures/#prepare-and-perform-the-source-release

We don't know how non-maven modules prevent SNAPSHOT dependencies.

It's up to the development teams how to prevent SNAPSHOT dependencies.


Go modul mod-reporting:

When accepted as a module we indirectly adopt Go as a language.

Should we first accept Go as a language including specific criteria regarding static code analysis, security, etc.?

In the past PoCs have been used to add new stuff to FOLIO without evaluation/approval.

We had been discussing the Go RfC for months.

Regarding adding the Go stack we need more feedback from the community.


10 minDeveloper advocate updatePatrick Pace (Unlicensed)
  • /wiki/spaces/DA/pages/416743762
  • /wiki/spaces/DA/pages/475070465
  • Some notes:
    • Met Thor team.  Met Oleksii's group.  
    • Developer documentation group: meetings with Khalilah, Terrence (NLA), John Coburn.
    • Identifying pages to be migrated.  Developing DDG membership & roles.
    • Local dev work, setting up env, trying single-server install, understanding different components.  Understanding developers' limiting factors.
    • 6m contract ends in about a week, personal things came up.  Won't be able to take the next contract.  Wrapping up, handing off.  Will do a "role in review".  Leave artifacts that might be beneficial.
5 min

Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates

All

Static Code Analysis

  • Ingolf Kuss no plan how to mitigate the disagreements.
  • Jenn Colt will start a thread to discuss offline

Developer Documentation

Reference Data Upgrades

  • No update
  • Marc Johnson This group never got started, were waiting for a TC discussion with the right people.
  • Jenn Colt Leave for today.


1 minRFCs

All

Reminder(s)

  • Review of open items, such as the need for decision log records and the application of the "Go" RFC.
    • Still need merge and decision log entry
1 minDecision LogAll

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

15 min

Officially Supported Technologies (OST)

All

Check Recurring Calendar...

We still need to transition the Sunflower page from DRAFT → ACCEPTED... ASAP.  What is preventing this from happening? 

  • Jenn Colt Delay is related to the devops discussion about Java.  Checked with Mike G. just before the meeting about whether it will cause an issue for Jenkins.
  • Marc Johnson For some period of time we will need Jenkins agents on both versions of java, running concurrently.
  • Jenn Colt Mike's question was about compatibility.  Whether a Java 21 build image will be compatible with Jenkins (on Java 8).
    • Marc Johnson Thought Jenkins was on Java 11.  But how long do we wait?
    • Jenn Colt OST discussion this Wednesday?
    • Sunflower release scope composition deadline was September 27, so that's our deadline.  Jenn Colt will let Mike know that.
NAZoom Chat


Jenn Colt 11:12 AM
https://github.com/folio-org/tech-council/pull/76

Patrick Pace  to  Everyone 11:39 AM
August Report - Developer Advocacy - FOLIO Wiki (atlassian.net)

Craig McNally  to  Everyone 11:54 AM
21 Oct 2024
Sunflower R1 2025 release scope refinement deadline


27 Sep 2024
Sunflower R1 2025 release scope composition deadline

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.
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.