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Prefix your topic with your intention so we are clear on what outcome you are striving from the discussion. Examples:
[inform] You are simply seeking to inform the group of this item. You may field clarifying questions from the group on your inform, but not seeking further discussion at this time.
[ideation] You are seeking divergent and wide perspectives from this group. In this brainstorming mode, all ideas are accepted, without critical analysis.
It may be helpful to clarify whether you’d like to ideate on the problem space or the solution space.
[analysis] You are asking the group to help you poke holes in your idea/topic/plan/etc.
[quest] You are seeking information/responses to a question you have.
2021-12-22
[ideation] (David J) What do we need to change in Tutor to make it minimally useful for edX developers to start using?
[quest] (David J) What is paver used for today? Corollary, what is paver?
Paver is a python library for creating tasks to be executed from the command line
Runs unit tests, building static assets, maintenance tasks, in edx-platform. Never got used anywhere else.
Still technically maintained. Started moving away from it and running the underlying commands directly.
We did not build paver.
There's two parts of this:
We didn't make paver, it's someone else's thing.
We did write a lot of code to run things under paver. It may look like we made it because we wrote so much on top of it.
Chain of thought: we need a task runner, make files are default, messy and shell based, want to do something in python, lets use paver. Wait, this is complicated, lets go back to using Makefiles.
Makefiles and paver give you a way of saying "this command needs these other commands first"
Django management commands don't do that.
The appeal was complex dependent-task management ("Only run this thing once even if several commands need it")
Problem with Make: needs to be implemented as shell scripts
Paver lets you use python files instead of shell scripts.
When the project was first starting out, we wanted anyone to be able to run it anywhere. A lot of initial goodwill - as the reality of that set in, we decided supporting windows is hard and not valuable for the amount of investment we'd have to do to keep it working. Usage of paver stemmed out of that, but then getting back out became too big for any team to take on.
2021-12-01
[quest/ideation] (Diana) - Devstack data project - who has a good use case that we should tackle?
Have a prototype that will load data into devstack
Arch-BOM were hunting around for a team with a good use case
Reach out to #arch-bom if you have a use case
[Ideation] (Justin Lapierre) How to set up a course/configuration in Devstack for QA in a reliable, reproducible way
[ideation] (David J) As the balance of edX devs to core contributors shifts in the future, how do we think that affects the risk profile of our CI/CD pipelines deploying off of master, and what might need to change? :eyes:
"Support not changing things until there's a problem"
We may not be the only people deploying from master - what if _we_ break someone else's systems?
SWG perspective - how do we do security releases reliably?
How do we know we're in a more risky situation?
Added complexity of pre-empting this problem is very expensive, so wait on the RCAs
"Eventual trouble is probably inevitable", we don't know what the problem will be, but we may be able to game out how we might deal with the problem. There's no code change we can't roll back (putting aside malicious stuff) Data migrations are scary because they can be 100% destructive and irreversible. And/or wildly unperformant.
We have point-in-time recovery to the minute (!!!)
Does GitHub have a canonical solution to what edx-platform-private solves today?
Jinder said Feanil or others looked into this early on and it wasn’t ready.
May still be hard for GoCD to deploy off of private forks.
Idea: "migration files require an extra approval" via CODEOWNERS
[inform] (Adam B) - Spreading this info more widely: If you want to add users with granular permissions to ecommerce you can now do so through app-permissions, e.g. like this
Also if you want to manage users for other services via code, Matt Hughes has offered to test out these setup docs on registrar.
[ideation/analysis] (David J) In spirit, over time edX employees could be thought of as core contributors themselves. The CC program has a time commitment (20 hrs/month). Could edX engineers/others be CCs? What would that look like for product delivery teams?
Ecommerce collaborative push?
Can we borrow from other communities?
Communities
Flywheel to support community which then helps us
We focused on drag, but what about focusing on benefit?
What features does edX/2U want?
Goal: Reducing ambiguity around expectations
Can we be a bit more formal around finding what folks are interested in and hooking them up with the right WG/people?
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