2024-10-21 Meeting notes

Date

21 Oct 2024

Attendees

Discussion items

Time	Item	Who	Notes
1 min	Scribe	All	Jason Root is next, followed by Jakub Skoczen 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 Nothing from CC PC: Marc Johnson (covering for Tod Olson) Reporting in Folio - Multiple options. What is the PC's role in finding the direction in the ecosystem - how does the PC navigate that? RMS Group: No updates Security Team: Business as usual Tri-council Application Formalization: Upcoming meeting has been scheduled
1 min	Upcoming Meetings	All	23 Oct 2024 - Dedicated discussion: TBD 24 Oct 2024 - Community Update (PC meeting & time slot) 28 Oct 2024 - Regular TC meeting 30 Oct 2024 - Dedicated discussion: Golang - w/ guests (David Crossley or someone else from DevOps familiar with what was done for CI/CD for Go modules) 04 Nov 2024 - Regular TC meeting
15 min	TCR Board Review	All	Today: Julian Ladisch will link story in TCR-44 for mod-reporting Marc says: Go might change dependency in code analysis group if the tool-set is changed
5 min	Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates
15-30 min	RFCs	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 The RFC Process document was never updated after adopting the wiki-based approach. Any volunteers to take a swing at cleaning this up? In theory the process is quite similar, only the parts about branching and creating PRs should be adjusted. Should we try to update it as we move through the RFC process for 0010-eureka? Today: Craig McNally has migrated the RFC template to the wiki: RFC Template (Title goes here) FQM RFC - What is the status of this? VBar is out this week, but Craig McNally did sync-up with him on this last week. An RFC was written and nearly complete a while ago, but never made it across the finish line. Vince asks for guidance on how to proceed: Option #1 - Finish up the RFC page which represents the state from last year OR Option #2 - Update it to reflect the latest state of FQM - including things like the security improvements covered at WOLFcon Also, should the page be reformatted to: Conform to the wiki-based RFC template? OR Convert it to more of a documentation / whitepaper page - which could then become a living document 0010-eureka - Preliminary Review Review: Summary, Scope, Motivation, and Timing. Notes: Static Code analysis mod-reporting criteria approved? Golang - adopt or not - may or may not be a prerequisite because Go not in the list of officially supported language RFC Template: Craig pulled together the template from Git to Wiki Craig asked for thoughts on how to clean up the process doc Marc recalls doing a run-thru 1st Craig will update 2 stages after the meeting FQM: It was written, but not really touched - did not cross the finish line Marc mentioned one of the ideas behind RFC process - The amount of effort was supposed to decrease, keep it high level Cross-database access privilege of modules? Marc suggests re-framing RFCs to be more about policies and less about the details - Maccabee agrees Two things that are important to the RFC: Cross-database module access? One-off or not for this process? Eureka RFC: Abstract is ready from Craig, copy and paste from Ebsco's own internal docs
1 min	Decision Log	All	Need to log decisions for the following: (see above) Jason's position on the TC: TAMU candidate going to be put forward, not going through the normal election process Jakub needs to confirm with Index Data/Mike G (confirmed now, Jason will be backup/proxy for ID) Tech Council members - will go to a vote
5 min	Officially Supported Technologies (OST)	All	Check Recurring Calendar...
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.
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.