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Put stuff here that we have to remember when we start packaging up for Lilac.  Especially important is information that system installers or operators will need to know. Please include your name when you add an item, so that we can get back to you with questions.

Schedule

• The open-release/lilac.master branches were created on April 9th 2021.

• The official release is scheduled to be June 9th 2021.

Operational

• Tracking metrics based on the anonymized session ID will experience a discontinuity or other anomaly at the time of deployment, as the anonymized IDs will change. [PR] This will likely appear as if everyone logged out and back in again, although only from a metrics perspective. In a green-blue deployment scenario, it may briefly appear as if there are twice as many sessions active. (Tim McCormack)

• Use of edx-proctoring now requires a setting PROCTORING_USER_OBFUSCATION_KEY – it should be initially set to the same value as SECRET_KEY, in both LMS and Studio. This allows it to be changed independently, although there is not yet a way to rotate it without breaking integration. (Tim McCormack)

• Upgraded to mongo 4(point-of-contact: Cory Lee (Deactivated) )

  • No changes were needed for us to move from mongo 3 to mongo 4 , but mongo 4 features may be used by edX developers going forward.

• Import unqualified packages from lms/djangoapps, cms/djangoapps, or common/djangoapps is no longer supported. Doing so will cause instances of import_shims.warn.DeprecatedEdxPlatformImportError to be raised. See https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/blob/master/docs/decisions/0007-sys-path-modification-removal.rst for details and context.

• LMS/Studio: Changes to edx-organizations (point-of-contact Kyle McCormick )

  • Uniqueness constraint added to Organization.short_name

    • This was added in edx-organizations 6.0.0. See release notes for details.

    • For instances that did not enable FEATURES['ORGANIZATIONS_APP'], this is a no-op

    • For instances the DID enable FEATURES['ORGANIZATIONS_APP'], any Organizations with conflicting short_names need to be removed (can be done via Django admin), else the migration for edx-organizations 6.0.0 will fail to apply.

  • Organizations feature globally enabled for all LMS and Studio instances.

    • See https://github.com/edx/edx-organizations/blob/master/docs/decisions/0001-phase-in-db-backed-organizations-to-all.rst for reasoning and details.

    • If you don’t care about this change, then it shouldn’t affect you, although we still recommend running the backfill command (see below).

  • Added ORGANIZATIONS_AUTOCREATE Django setting for Studio.

    • Defaults to True.

    • When True, creating a new course run or content library with an unrecognized org slug (that is, “edX” in course-v1:edX+DemoX+2T2020 will silently auto-create an organization in the background.

    • When False, creating a new course run or content library with an unrecognized org slug will raise an error. This is helpful if you wish to restrict the set of organizations under which course runs and content libraries may be created.

  • The FEATURES['ORGANIZATIONS_APP'] is no longer supported.

    • The Organization and OrganizationCourse model are now available on all instances.

    • If you previously enabled FEATURES['ORGANIZATIONS_APP'], then you should override the Studio setting ORGANIZATIONS_AUTOCREATE to Falsewhen upgrading to Lilac to achieve the same functionality.

  • Added Studio management command: ./manage.py cms backfill_orgs_and_org_courses

    • This back-populates the organizations_organization and organizations_organizationcourse tables, for Open edX instances that did not previously enable FEATURES['ORGANIZATIONS_APP'].

    • It is not critical to run this for the Lilac upgrade, since no features depend on these tables being populated yet.

    • However, future releases may make use of the data in these tables; hence, it is best to run the backfill now.

• The sysadmin dashboard is no longer supported (point-of-contact Hamza Farooq).

  • The feature has been deprecated according to DEPR-118, Its ADR can be found at ADR-DEPR-118 and related discussions at Discussion-DEPR-118.

  • The related feature flag FEATURES['ENABLE_SYSADMIN_DASHBOARD'] is also removed.

  • A separate pluggable app named edx-sysadmin has been developed at https://github.com/mitodl/edx-sysadmin and can be used as an alternative to sysadmin dashboard.

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