2024-05-13 Meeting notes

Owned by Jeremy Huff
Last updated: May 13, 2024 by Craig McNally
7 min read

Date

Attendees 


Discussion items

TimeItemWhoNotes
1 minScribeAll
Craig McNally followed by Tod Olson

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

Maccabee Levine

Tod Olson

Jakub Skoczen

Craig McNally

Jenn Colt 

Community Council Summary
I could only attend the first half, though folks were wrapping up as I left
  • MOU for modules signed off
    • Flower release inclusion is not contingent upon signing the MOU
      • Process to be back dated to recently approved modules
      • Process TBD at next CC meeting
    • Discontinuation of the advisory group
    • FOLIO Story Document
      • To be taken to PC and TC
      • Then later to the member’s group
    • Council Elections
      • 2 nominees for TC
      • 1 for PC
      • None for CC
      • Lots of seats to fill
  • PC: Tod Olson
  • RMS Group: Jakub Skoczen
    • From Jakub Skoczen:  
      • There is a checkmark next to my request to add the TC-proposed note around RFC milestones to the release timeline. Not sure if this means that it will be just added to the release timeline or if the TC should do it themselves though. I will ask
  • Security Team: Craig McNally
    • no update - business as usual.
  • Tri-council Application Formalization: Jenn Colt
5 minUpcoming MeetingsAll
  •  - Dedicated Discussion - Topic TBA.  Several TC members will be at Code4Lib (Maccabee Levine Jenn Colt Tod Olson)
    • Cancelled due to code4lib
  •  - Regular TC meeting
  •  - Dedicated Discussion - Communicating Breaking Changes
  • - Regular TC 
  • - Alternate time meeting for China and Australia topics?
4 minTCR Board ReviewAllThe board is clear, nothing to discuss
10-15 min

Technical Council Sub-Groups Updates

All

New Subgroups:

  • Static code analysis
  • New developer documentation

Participants for both of these are still a bit up in the air still.

5 minRFCs

All

  • Go Language: When will we do the final review?
    • Next Monday  
  • Application Formalization: When will we do the final review?
    • The following Monday  
5 minAction Items

Jeremy Huff

  • Jeremy Huff:
    • Advertise Communicating Breaking Changes PoC Demo update
    • Reach out to Australia and China for topics
    • Add developer suggested topics to our backlog
      • Done.
1 minDecision LogAll

Nothing new

10-15 min

Centralized vs Distributed configuration Final Review

Florian Gleixner

https://github.com/folio-org/rfcs/pull/32

  • Florian Gleixner walked us through the RFC
  • What about a transition plan?
    • Look in module descriptors to identify those which still consume mod-configuration
      • This may not give a complete/accurate picture.  We've run into cases where modules don't declare dependencies on interfaces they consume, including configuration.
    • Probably worth checking with UI devs where mod-configuration is consumed by the UI
      • E.g. for things like tenant locale, whether or not to show the "login via SSO" button, etc.
    • Should we create subgroup to "own" the transition plan?
      • Jeremy Huff - I would feel more comfortable approving this PR if we had something like this in place.
      • Florian Gleixner can maybe help with identifying mod-configuration usage, but would want help on the communications side
      • Action Item: Florian will create a subgroup and add Jeremy as a participant.
  • Who would make the necessary changes to mod-configuration?
  • Vote to approve this RFC passed with 6 yes, 0 no, several abstentions. 
  • Action Item:  Florian Gleixner to merge the RFC PR.
5-10 minCo Replacement for Jeremy HuffAll

Craig McNally doesn't mind staying on as co-chair to aid in transitioning to new TC leadership once Jeremy leaves this summer.  

Jenn Colt would like to volunteer, but she's up for re-election.

It seems it might be best to wait until after the elections, but it cannot hurt for those interested to speak up now

Time Permitting

Officially Supported Technologies (OST)

All

Standing agenda item to review/discuss any requested or required changes to officially supported technology lists


NAZoom Chat
11:12:20 From Ingolf Kuss to Everyone:
I will be out next Monday. That is a Holiday here.
11:58:32 From Jenn Colt to Everyone:
I would be but am up for reelection
11:59:35 From Jakub Skoczen to Everyone:
For the meeting notes: there is a checkmark next to my request to add the TC-proposed note around RFC milestones to the release timeline. Not sure if this means that it will be just added to the release timeline or if the TC should do it themselves though. I will ask

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 ChangesAllCurrently 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