Summary of Issue
There were a number of issues we encountered while trying to merge the new forums backend into edx-platform.
The process was disruptive to 2U because of the operational effort needed to deploy, test, and debug the new forums code on their infrastructure (it had been tested and deployed using Tutor prior to this point).
The process was disruptive to the Sumac release process, because of the coupling of the master branch and 2U's release pipeline. This put us in the position where we were cherry-picking the forums code onto the Sumac test sandbox for weeks, without landing it on either master or the sumac release branch.
This happened despite efforts to make the new forums functionality backwards compatible. 2U is also currently running the new forums code in a way that makes as few operational changes as possible from v1–still calling out to the Ruby service for everything. Further forums migration steps have the potential to be even more disruptive, and 2U has already indicated that it has no capacity to manage this transition in the Teak timeframe (as outlined in the DEPR ticket).
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Relevant Tickets
Timeline of Events
2024-11-11
Dave tags Kelly to give a heads up that the v2 forums code PR is getting close to merging in edx-platform.
Dave starts a Slack thread in
#ask-2uto ask if 2U has switched over toutf8mb4for database connections. This was motivated by the fact that the forums PR would create database tables for the new MySQL storage backend. If the config was not changed before deployment, the tables would not support storing emojis.
2024-11-13
After some investigation, Robert verifies that the encoding of the database connection for the LMS and Studio is still
utf8(which means it'sutf8mb3).
2024-11-18
Forums PR gets final approvals.
2024-11-19
2U's staging environment Elasticsearch is not working, making it impossible to properly test forums in that environment. Asad informs the channel that SRE has reached out to AWS support
2024-11-21
Robert makes a new ticket to 2U SRE. Merging the PR to master is delayed.
The rationale for this was that the configuration change would be straightforward (requires no data migration, Tutor has connected this way by default since Redwood, and most sites that we know of also connect in this manner). And that by doing that configuration change, we would save 2U having to spend more time modifying those tables in the future.
2024-11-22
Alex notifies the Slack thread that SRE is investigating the connection encoding issue.
The 2U staging instance Elasticsearch is fixed.
2024-11-25
More discussion of the scope of required changes, and whether changing this configuration falls under SRE or app owners.
2024-11-26
Ahtisham and Diana pick up the configuration work, but we agree that deployment shouldn't happen until after the long U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.
(incomplete: Dave will continue filling this in on Monday)
How did this happen?
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[Robert] Why was Forums v2 included in Sumac so long after the branches were cut?
[Robert] See https://discuss.openedx.org/t/btr-forum-sumac-backport-discussion/14332 (needs more notes). This decision certainly impacted this situation.
[Robert] Why wasn't Forums v2 merged into master earlier?
[Robert] It would impact 2U as soon as it was merged.
[Robert] It was waiting on 2U to fully test the disabled state.
[Robert] Why wasn't Forums v2 better tested in a disabled state before reaching 2U? (Or was it, and were these 2U-unique issues?)
[Robert] Why wasn't Forums v2 (under development) merged behind a release toggle months ago in a disabled state?
[Robert] Was this to save the default-state of enabled? Other?