Arch Hour: 2020-10-08 (Blended Dev Ideas + Devstack Versions)

Owned by Nimisha Asthagiri (Deactivated)
Last updated: Oct 08, 2020 by Jinder Singh (Deactivated)
3 min read

Topics

Please enter your proposed topics for discussion here.
In Lean Coffee Style (link1, link2), we will vote on which topics the group wants to discuss and time-box the discussion to 10 or 15mns → 5mns (if re-voted) → 5mns (if re-voted).

Brainstorm on next round of Blended Development ideas

Proposal to move forward with (based on ideation below):

  1. Code health

    1. Implement list of desired repo health checks (and possibly suggest new ones)

    2. For the pylint cleanup

    3. edx-platform cleanup (TBD - need to refine this)

  2. Frontend maintenance & discovery

Voting Legend:

  • was used first, for each participant’s favorite top-level, bolded category

  • was used next - each participant got 3 of these votes, and put them on specific items they wanted to see happen

  • was then used only inside Code Health to pick your one, top favorite item.
    (italicized blue = probably self-contained effort; red = will probably need more hand-holding with edX engineers; bold green = on blended board)

Ideas and Votes:

  • Misc

  • Code Health

    • Implement list of desired repo health checks (and possibly suggest new ones)

      • What environment is running in prod? (Python and Ubuntu versions, etc.)

      • Does this service still use ansible for deployment?

      • Do the Ansible and Dockerfile match in important respects?

      • Is there any non-ASCII in setup.cfg?

    • Fix remaining issues with using Black (or similar), start using it to standardize code formatting

    • edx-platform code health

      • Find and fix import direction issues in edx-platform (make it more logical, easier to move things out); e.g., fix it so things under common don’t import from lms packages, etc.

        • maybe as part of or as a result of this: restructuring the platform to be more comprehensible/approachable

      • Not a new idea, but giving a +1 for the pylint cleanup and other edx-platform cleanup -Kyle

        • Pain points:

          • Escaped bugs

          • Can’t leverage pylint feedback in edx-platform IDE

        • Removing paver

  • Testing

    • Prototype consumer-based contract tests (Pact) (may be red)

    • If we decide they’re worth keeping – Improving our end-to-end tests

      • or implementing a new suite on better technology

      • Migrate our remaining browser automation tests (a11y, e2e, etc.) from bok-choy/Selenium to cypress or playwright

    • Ditching karma/jasmine in favor of jest - many tests could probably be re-written fairly easily

      • (karma/jasmine are much slower and more finicky)

  • Frontend Maintenance & Discovery

    • DEPR-100 - deprecation and removal of old frontend libraries: frontend-auth, frontend-i18n, frontend-analytics, frontend-logging, frontend-base

    • DEPR frontend-component-site-header, frontend-component-site-footer

      • Some MFEs may be private and can’t be updated via outsourcing.

    • Transitioning our ES6 repos from eslint-config-edx to @edx/eslint-config.

    • Upgrading our ES5 code to use all the ES6 language features that are now supported by our supported browsers, hopefully to aid the removal of our ES5 eslint-config-edx configuration.

    • Fixing legacy frontend tooling

      • Anything more specific here?

      • e.g., running JS Tests locally - running single tests

    • DEPR old frontend pages (on DEPR backlog)

    • Frontend Discovery

      • Existing technologies in use across pages

      • Surveying the Open edX ecosystem on their use of Comprehensive theming

How to do versioning for devstack?

  • flagging last good images/commits

    • consider Open edX community releases also (Koa, Lilac, etc)

    • Jinder reviewed past issues in #devstack-questions

      • Observation: various issues with “certain versions” of devstack - that could be fixed by just going to a known working version

      • Q: how is versioning of devstack different from versioning of services?

        • Various versions:

          • Images

          • Devstack code

          • Repo code

          • Built assets

          • Data models

      • Note: we already have Git versions and image versions, but we don’t have an “easy” way to go in-between versions.

      • Q: what other ecosystem in the open source community may have similar problems that we can look at?

        • OpenStack? Has its own devstack, and lots of services

      • Q: could using pip-sync be better than pip-install?

      • Note: docker has a layered image cache that allows selective pulling of images

        • If we started the base image with a particular version (like the Open edX named release), then only add incremental changes.

      • Ideas:

        • Guidelines for troubleshooting

        • A named/stable release of devstack, which includes a collection of versions that are known to work well together.

        • “Pin” dependencies

        • Down-voting “bad versions” through a bot that devstack references

        • Just use Docker in the correct way

        • Image layering with more stable base images

React - Discussions Forum - editor input - draft JS

  • DJoy: draft JS is fine; need more info to understand tradeoffs.

Backlog of Questions/Discussions

This section lists a backlog of previous proposed topics that haven’t yet been discussed.

  • Shopping cart deprecation with Diana

    • lessons learned, knowledge sharing on dead code, etc.