edx-platform Maintenance  Sub-Group (2024-06-20 09:10 GMT-4) - Transcript

Attendees

Adolfo Brandes, Awais Qureshi, Chintan Joshi, Feanil Patel, Feanil Patel's Presentation, Jeremy Ristau, Kyle McCormick, Muhammad Qasim Gulzar, Piotr Surowiec, Robert Raposa, Tim Krones

Transcript

This editable transcript was computer generated and might contain errors. People can also change the text after it was created.

Feanil Patel: All right.

Robert Raposa: too many dropping the dock one more time.

Feanil Patel: Yeah, yeah. let me just share it real quick and then I'll

Feanil Patel: Hi everybody. Welcome to the maintenance working group meeting for June 20th.

Feanil Patel: Real quick. Let's go through the backlog of things. I think this is done Jeremy you figured out that to you or it does not want to own front end app learning. And they're going to do the handoff for that actually here. maybe we should come back to that during the non-edex platform part. Let me see what's edx platform specific here.

Feanil Patel: Robert, did you add the issue for improving docs in edx platform?

Robert Raposa: seeing that's nine and…

Feanil Patel: That'll yeah.

Robert Raposa: I'll go to the notes and just remind myself what this is about so you can see.

Feanil Patel: alright maintenance tax then Kyle, you're still turning the big edex platform maintenance ideas into issues

Kyle McCormick: Yeah, I haven't done it.

Feanil Patel: Okay.

Feanil Patel: And then I have not done this which I'm hoping to do today Start that Doc and start thinking about those models.

Kyle McCormick: I think that one about 10 is just not the right action at him.

Feanil Patel: yeah, I think it's the wrong number and I think that Serena and I have this wrong is useful.

Kyle McCormick: I think I made a GitHub issue that we can just …

Feanil Patel: Yeah.

Kyle McCormick: it's about this. Music came out of that. It's not a quick win sort of thing. I think Sir and…

Feanil Patel: Okay.

Kyle McCormick: hopes when she wrote that action at him. It's more of a nice it did time and…

Feanil Patel: I see.

Kyle McCormick: do this.

Feanil Patel: So yeah, do you want to just go find that item and check it off? It won't let

Kyle McCormick: Sad that works. I have to okay.

Feanil Patel: because I can't do it in edit mode. So if you're in non edit mode, I think it'll let you. Yeah, yeah.

Kyle McCormick: yeah perception 10

Chintan Joshi: So this one item that's there and I just wanted to ask because when I do a build it fails, so is it still okay to raise up here for that?

Feanil Patel: I think if it's failing then you'll have to dig into sort of why it's failing and see if you can fix it.

Feanil Patel: And if you can't it's still okay to raise the PR, but maybe Make I think it's still okay to have the pr so that we know where there are breakages and we need more and more support and more investigation. But if you can figure out what's going on and fix it, that would be super helpful.

Feanil Patel: And if you need help with that definitely reach out in the maintenance Channel and we can dig into it.

Feanil Patel: okay, everything else is I think larger maintenance working group meeting related let's see

Feanil Patel: Kyle is you

Kyle McCormick: It is indeed.

Feanil Patel: go for

Kyle McCormick: I feel like having Jeremy here would be really useful. Is there anything else we could talk about while I wait for him to get back?

Feanil Patel: Ozzy is he not there? I say.

Feanil Patel: Yeah, I see that now.

Kyle McCormick: Okay.

Feanil Patel: Okay, let's wait for him in the meantime. I think there's the other FYI, which is the node 20 pull requests.

Feanil Patel: You can pull it up.

Feanil Patel: So this is maybe a question for you Robert I bumped all of our JavaScript testing index platform to know 20 and it's green.

Feanil Patel: When we talk about the timer for the six months period that we want to support both. Is that as soon as I merge this? I had sort of a related question that I love people's feedback on which is True that I update. The nvmrc is developed is this good enough to just be It is now official that if you're developing on edx platform, you should be using note 20. But you build your dot package lock using 16. So there's a bit of complexity here. Or we could just say leave the nvmrc alone until that six month period because that's when it's officially dropping support for the old version.

00:05:00

Robert Raposa: Yeah, and then I would either personally need to catch up a little bit more or have someone else come into this because I thought with node. We had big questions about can we actually support both at once and…

Feanil Patel: Yeah. Yeah.

Robert Raposa: to so I'm just wearing of this topic is more complex than my experience in this area.

Feanil Patel: Empirically this set of requirements is currently supporting both node, 18 and 20. So I think it's often hard in JavaScript land because dependencies are so complex, but it turns out in this case that it is possible. If we turn on the 20 tests, then we'll know. If we break anything for either pretty quickly.

Kyle McCormick: what's the implication of changing nvmrc?

Feanil Patel: Any developer who is doing development in edx platform? will automatically Use the version that's defined in nvmrc if they're using NVM, which is the standard way that a lot of our mfis are managed right now. so I think that's…

Kyle McCormick: Got it.

Feanil Patel: why I left it out because essentially if you update on vmrc to 20 and then you do an npm install it'll update everything to the latest possible version that node 20 can support

Kyle McCormick: right, so Prepare metal devs. That's probably true. for

Feanil Patel: yeah.

Kyle McCormick: devsec users. I don't know what happens tutor pins its own node version.

Feanil Patel: Okay.

Kyle McCormick: So I think

Kyle McCormick: I think you can make the change without impacting most Developers.

Feanil Patel: So it sounds to me Got it. but I think the right move is to update nvmrc and tutor at the same time six months from now or whenever we have declared support, right, that's the point at which development should be done only on the new version. So that's probably when we want to drop the old version because if we take the three eight three eleven example You probably still want to do makeup grade and all those other tasks on three eight. I mean you definitely want to do all of those tests on 3/8…

Kyle McCormick: That makes sense.

Feanil Patel: until you drop three eight support. So I think this is adding testing for 20, but it's not removing support for 18. It's when we drop support for 18 that we need to move all of the defaults up off of 18 to 20.

Kyle McCormick: Yep.

Robert Raposa: and I think one question that I have is for the you…

Feanil Patel: Yeah.

Robert Raposa: the six months or earlier right as soon as everyone who is affected can actually Deal with things…

Feanil Patel: Yeah.

Robert Raposa: how do we know who that listed is or is that to you?

Feanil Patel: I mean that list is currently to you. Until somebody says that they're also on that list that list is to you.

Robert Raposa: Okay. That sounds good.

Robert Raposa: Just double check.

Feanil Patel: Yeah, yeah.

Kyle McCormick: Yeah, I've been trying to say early employers as an abstract term for that group of people, but it's a if becomes a set of multiple then That'll be cool. And I think we just expand that process to this process to them as well. We should probably keep pulsing that every once in a while hey.

Robert Raposa: who got it and it

Kyle McCormick: If you run off of Master pay attention to this and if we see that there's another set of eyes then. We can start generalizing.

Robert Raposa: Yeah, I don't have Jeremy mentioned this or whatever. But have we reached out to Peter pinch? I mean do they not have one of these types of environments like I keep hearing different things, but Peters never on the call one. This comes up. So it would probably be useful to reach out to him.

Feanil Patel: Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Ristau: I do believe I got Information from him a long time ago. I'll see if I can dig up the place where I saved it all. I asked a whole bunch…

Robert Raposa: Yeah.

Jeremy Ristau: Partners I guess or whatever you call them operators.

Robert Raposa: yeah, I mean we should just ask again in case the answer has changed to

Feanil Patel: Right, right. so the related question I have then is when I click this merge button. Is that the start of our six month timer? what is the process? We want to follow? when we're like, hey nude edx platform now supports node 20, please upgrade to using it if you are what? Did you call Kyle a master like a

00:10:00

Kyle McCormick: but I said earlier deploy it if you're an early employer trying to avoid them,…

Feanil Patel: yeah. Yeah.

Kyle McCormick: home Master thing, but main deployer just feels like it's Not the same thing.

Feanil Patel: I got you anyways, but yeah, go forward Jeremy.

Jeremy Ristau: At my understanding it was tied to the dapper? so it's six months from the deprecation of Yeah,…

Feanil Patel: Okay, then I would open the dapper. Yeah.

Jeremy Ristau: you deprecate note 18 and then it's six months.

Feanil Patel: right

Jeremy Ristau: It's the timing I guess is determined in the Dapper I guess is the best way of saying that.

Jeremy Ristau: 

Jeremy Ristau: 'cause right you can open the opportunity to upgrades node 20, but until there's a reason,…

Feanil Patel: Platforms. Yeah

Jeremy Ristau: your standard user won't. on board right away

Kyle McCormick: so should finial open a diaper and So I propose deprecating note 18. And that we will remove support for it six months from what no 20 support is introduced. set cool and then there's two we common period never

Jeremy Ristau: It's alright to me. Yeah.

Feanil Patel: Okay, and then relatedly. the other thing was like is this the right? Layer of complexity. So I can open one of these for edx platform but obviously all of the other mfes and things will have their own Cadence or looking at 30 deppers that are each on slightly different cadences as they get updated over the next couple of months.

Feanil Patel: I am more okay with that than waiting till the last thing is updated before we can start the Dipper. But I would love other people's thoughts.

Robert Raposa: I mean one possibility for sort of Simplicity sick is to have the initial Dipper cover everything with a note caveat that if for some reason a particular MFE is going to be harder to switch or whatever within that six month period then you should spin off it a ticket about it.

Robert Raposa: And it's as a possibility if you don't want to. have to spin up all the tickets now preemptively when it might be like, let's just put on the main group that we want to prioritize this deprecation over the next six months and Review that related to everything else and hopefully, within six months. We can get that work done,…

Feanil Patel: right

Robert Raposa: but I don't actually know how we were talking about expanding contract is the expand for the mfps.

Feanil Patel: right

Robert Raposa: Just simple or is there a whole bunch of work that we don't know how big it is?

Feanil Patel: Yeah, we don't know yet. I don't think it'll be hard. I think there aren't major breakages between 18 and 20 that I'm aware of from the docs that I've read.

Feanil Patel: So I don't think it'll be too bad. But again, we won't know I'm reluctant to open a single depper at the top level because

Feanil Patel: 19 out of the 20 mfe's are ready to go today. It makes sense to start those 19 timers. But if the 20th is going to take till the week before the six month period is over that doesn't feel. Correct to me in terms of actually giving people the right amount of time, right?

Kyle McCormick: You could just open one for edx platform since edx platform big and…

Feanil Patel: Yeah. Yeah.

Kyle McCormick: exceptional And then when we have a sense of what the mfas are going to look like we can decide between batches or 20 Dappers or…

Feanil Patel: Yeah.

Kyle McCormick: one big difference. or what Robert said

Robert Raposa: That sounds reasonable. It also reminds me of sort of the question for the mfe's. is by Cruise responsible for the expand Phase and as though if we are waiting until the expense is done typically until there's some Balance here of going. we want to wait until the expand phase to give six months. But if the team that is responsible for the expense is the one that would wait forever. Then we need to somehow introduce a date by which the expense is to be done or something of that name.

00:15:00

Feanil Patel: Yeah, right,…

Kyle McCormick: Yeah.

Feanil Patel: yeah let's talk about that during the second half of this when adolfo's around because I think that's a more General plan, but I think for ex platform if all of us are in alignment that I'll just make the note 18 Dipper today. products platform and then merge that pull request Okay numbers that pull request now.

Feanil Patel: rude

Feanil Patel: Okay, so we've got the new test Matrix running and that'll give us a bit of an idea of how it's doing If there's any issues as we run a couple of PR through it.

Feanil Patel: And then I'll make that Dipper for that. And so we'll start the six month timer. for edx platform it may

Robert Raposa: Are this required tests? Are they? not just Yeah.

Feanil Patel: yeah, the JavaScript test. Yeah.

Robert Raposa: and the no choice

Feanil Patel: The new 21's not yet. But I will add them to the required list.

Feanil Patel: wasn't gonna say

Feanil Patel: I don't know, okay.

Feanil Patel: yeah the sixth month period Might actually not work for the node upgrade since six months from now is December which is passed when we need to upgrade node.

Feanil Patel: So because of the timing of when the version goes out of support, can we shrink that? Period for node to say would it be four months?

Robert Raposa: I mean Probably when is the next name released date? I mean, is that what we're running up against?

Feanil Patel: Yeah, essentially. so ideally Yeah.

Kyle McCormick: It's either October.

Kyle McCormick: It's between October 9th. And November 9th is the window that the race would be cut.

Feanil Patel: Yeah.

Jeremy Ristau: That works pretty well for six months from now.

Feanil Patel: right

Jeremy Ristau: Five to six months from now.

Feanil Patel: I guess and now that I'm thinking about it. It's okay because as long as we expand before that six month period the release can have the new version

Kyle McCormick: We have to build a requirements with no 20 for the release.

Feanil Patel: We didn't for Python 3 8 slash 11, so that's fine. Yeah, so I think as long as support is expanded within the next six months or fine. And that makes sense because technically I think node 18 is still supported till January or February of next year. So from a early deployers perspective like that. You guys can push that a little bit if you needed to.

Feanil Patel: So that's fine. I think the six month period is totally fine as long as all the expansions happen before the end of the six months that's going to be the sort of community Target and then the contractions Will happen based on the depart timeline. That feels like a good. exercise of this theoretical process

Robert Raposa: And that I think the last piece of this. process which maybe will be in the next meeting is looking at the main board and getting things on the main board with dates so that we can be like,…

Feanil Patel: Yeah.

Robert Raposa: that feels pretty good and we forgot about X Y and Z commitments or that feels good and we haven't committed to anything else. You know what I mean?

Feanil Patel: Yeah, one of the I totally agree. I think a related thing that I would love people's thoughts on is.

Feanil Patel: Sizing it's easy to add at a node 18 to note 20 upgrade for open edx ticket. Do you really want to 213 or even like a hundred and ten? Node 18 to node 20 tickets for every repo that's in the platform on that board. Do we just need to have a couple different views so that we can like what views do people care about is maybe the core question. I want to ask.

Robert Raposa: I mean, I think we all sort of agree that on that board would be high level things more like epic level and…

Feanil Patel: Greater, okay. Yeah, yeah.

Robert Raposa: other boards as needed or however other dealt with

Feanil Patel: Right, right. because the reason I asked that in particular is because I was thinking specifically of the situation where For example, the high level ticket on the maintenance board would be upgrade open edx from node 18 to note 20. Is that a platform ticket wouldn't be on that board, but you guys need to know about it so that you can act on it. How can we sort of ensure that the granular visibility related to taking action is accessible to you guys. Does that make sense?

00:20:00

Robert Raposa: I mean, I don't know. Task list with tickets, but Kyle has his interest.

Feanil Patel: but yeah, go find out. Sorry.

Kyle McCormick: Before the other half the meeting was in I was gonna try to give my FYI Above This…

Feanil Patel: yeah, I did.

Kyle McCormick: which details pretty nicely Are three Deckers that have the six-month time we're going I updated the tickets themselves based on One support was added and announced and so those are the dates for each of them. Yeah, these probably need to go on a board and whatever way we were just talking about.

Robert Raposa: estimate definitely relates to the depart Topic in general that I think mission to cover larger

Feanil Patel: right Right, should these just yeah.

Robert Raposa: also in terms of a process question, we had some topics that didn't make it to the actual discussion last time Is there Are we just gonna leave it on people to be like if it's still Find your own way again kind of thing versus. Having a place we could drop those topics.

Feanil Patel: Yeah, I think if it's important, please come at it to this list. And yeah, I think that's correct.

Robert Raposa: Okay.

Feanil Patel: So there's no 1920 expand contract. There's was the other thing called.

Feanil Patel: I'll just let people trickle in for a second. I'm gonna arrange kind of want to talk about this Debra thing a little bit more just because I don't feel like we have a good answer.

Feanil Patel: Hi everybody.

Feanil Patel: Give people a minute or two to trickle in.

Feanil Patel: Adolfo probably worth reading through this edx platform node 20 bit the tldr is that I turned on node in the testing Matrix for edx platform and it passed so I merged it.

Adolfo Brandes: Great. Let's

Feanil Patel: So I was just curious. I'm like, I wonder what the problems are and it went green. So I'm like

Adolfo Brandes: we did that with the templates application and there was Zero trouble. So I was hoping that would be the case for many repos. I'm very glad that friedlex platform that was

Feanil Patel: Nice, yeah.

Feanil Patel: Yeah, me too. I think with all the new upgrades there's less. stuff that has dropped support for the version like yeah.

Adolfo Brandes: Yeah.

Adolfo Brandes: famous last words, but I'm thinking the note 20 is gonna be relative Breeze compared to at knocking on actual wood here.

Feanil Patel: Yeah, no, I think so too. But one of the questions that came up was around sort of what that expand contract looks like that we were talking about last time actually here. I merge this does that mean the timer starts for the six month period before we drop node 18 support netx platform. Right, and I think we sort of arrived at that timer starts when the Dapper is created.

00:25:00

Feanil Patel: So that means that one.

Adolfo Brandes: And for node 18,…

Adolfo Brandes: okay. Yeah.

Feanil Patel: the depover node 18 in particular And there's this question of do we create one high level Dapper or do we create 25 Deckers one for each MFE kind of a question. Yeah. for edx platform Yeah,…

Feanil Patel: 

Adolfo Brandes: It's one big one. Yeah.

Feanil Patel: yeah for any platform. I'm just gonna do a separate one for addicts platform just because it's big enough. but then for the other mfes if it's easy, I think that's in the issues where you have add 20 to the metrics and get it to I think once it's green for 20 one of the steps needs to create the Dapper update the Dapper related to the note 18 to 20 to be like this. Repo is ready. Does that make sense?

Adolfo Brandes: Yes, it does. Yeah, it's something that wasn't in the steps before but yeah, sure.

Feanil Patel: Yeah, So I think that's why I mentioning it is. I think this is a new Step based on the process that we're now agreeing to around maintenance windows.

Adolfo Brandes: Yeah. That makes sense. No objections.

Feanil Patel: okay, and this feels like it should be an ADR on the maintenance.

Feanil Patel: maintenance, oep around maintenance window lengths and such

Kyle McCormick: products worth I was hoping we could if this pilot of using the debt process for our breaking changes Is good. I'd rather completely update the Depo up. So if you want a pen and…

Feanil Patel: okay, that sounds Let's hold up.

Kyle McCormick: I'm not gonna stop you…

Kyle McCormick: but in terms of yeah.

Feanil Patel: No, that is not my favorite thing exactly.

Feanil Patel: I got my name on it.

Kyle McCormick: So I think we should definitely take good notes on what we're doing so that we can then update the with what we

Feanil Patel: Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah..

Robert Raposa: should we just open an issue

Robert Raposa: where we can just add more notes.

Feanil Patel: 

Feanil Patel: Yeah, I mean, I think it's find a collect them in our meeting notes and sort of. Try to distill them.

Robert Raposa: Okay, that's it.

Feanil Patel: Once we've actually gone through the process. I feel like we're learning a lot even just like trying to exercise the process. At the beginning of this note upgrade. So I'm curious to see where we end up at the end.

Feanil Patel: So you're thinking Adolfo one high level Dapper for all of the mfes probably for all the other fees that are supported in.

Feanil Patel: in sumac

Feanil Patel: Right because the pr to drop support for a note 18 will probably end up Landing in December or something. But as long as the pr to expand access has dropped before October we should be fine.

Feanil Patel: Right, right. Cool. Okay.

Feanil Patel: All right. I think we're aligned on that. The next thing I want to talk about was Deckers another granular ticket. So yeah, I think Kyle has these tickets for support that's being dropped in edx platform. They have times on them. Is this sufficient for Robert and Jeremy for you guys. Is this sufficient to sort of react also, others who are operating edx platform and need to know when we're dropping support for things like dropping the public Docker images or paver are the Deckers sufficient. There's going to be a lot more of them if we are using them for example, dropping language support and doing upgrades.

Robert Raposa: Yeah, but by sufficient do you mean putting them on the maintenance board? you dropping them in the stock? Is that sufficient but

Feanil Patel: I mean having them on the deprecation board because they are so granular that my understanding was that you didn't want them on the maintenance board because that's for high level items. So I'm trying to figure out sort of what? level of

Robert Raposa: yes, To me these seem independently unique High. I mean they may not be

Robert Raposa: some may be bigger than others, So I'll change what I'm saying. So for me these would be on there and…

00:30:00

Feanil Patel: Okay.

Robert Raposa: they would be considered high level even though they're small. but feel free to disagree.

Feanil Patel: Okay.

Feanil Patel: Yeah.

Robert Raposa: For me in my ideal would be the maintenance project. Board is a place where I could see here's all the things that people have to deal with by particular dates.

Feanil Patel: Okay. Yeah.

Robert Raposa: up and It gives everybody.

Feanil Patel: yeah, the only reason that feels weird to me is because then we're just the question that comes to my mind is why do I just combine the maintenance and Dapper boards to be one board because everything on the Decker board will need to be on the maintenance board at that point.

Feanil Patel: which is perhaps the Next Step. I'm just thinking through that feels. A little weird because there are much smaller things and perhaps it's one of those things where we constantly have to be doing this mapping back and forth because is there operator impact or not for this stepper? And if there is it goes on the maintenance board? I'm gonna be yeah.

Robert Raposa: I haven't thought through whether there's anything that is make board. That's not different board or if we've made enough changes where it's like we don't need to make or the depper board is our main board as long as it has everything that we need to look at in terms of dates then the board. Yeah, so

Feanil Patel: alright

Jeremy Ristau: Generally, I find that to be what sounds like I don't know about in practice. But what sounds like a healthy approach is how can new working groups plug into existing communication channels rather than trying to invent their own and hope people adopt them this feels like a healthy way of achieving that

Feanil Patel: right

Jeremy Ristau: but it could be in logistical nightmare. Yeah.

Feanil Patel: right Yeah, I think that's sort of the question is I really like the Deborah board because I think we've been working really hard over the last two years to be things on the Decker board mean stuff and if things are gonna go away you will know it here. If you're not looking here you will miss it. And so I kind of like that for that particular.

Jeremy Ristau: Yeah.

Feanil Patel: I'd rather not have people look at the maintenance board for that and rather just look at the Depot board for that and maybe the maintenance board is more internal to us for planning. And sort of thinking about sort of long-term sequencing than it is about knowing what's going to break and breakages and operation changes always go through Decker board.

Robert Raposa: That's good. And I mean we were talking about adding some board level metadata for dates the dates that Kyle put in here and…

Feanil Patel: Yeah.

Robert Raposa: So I think that's just something we should bring to the ever working group and get onto the Duggar board.

Feanil Patel: Yeah. Yeah.

Robert Raposa: So that Make it more easily visible.

Feanil Patel: I think if you me and Kyle agree, then we've got a majority on the Dipper working group. So

Robert Raposa: That sounds good.

Feanil Patel: yeah, because I think the depart actually contains a couple of different things. One of which is so I think being able to mark on the deprecation side that this is an operational Impact versus just a code change would be useful maybe so that might be a thing we need to bring up over there.

Feanil Patel: I'm going to call this a decision.

Feanil Patel: Yeah, so we'll use the maintenance board for planning to see what's coming down the line for us and we will have Deckers for anything where people need to respond to them. Anybody have any concerns about that?

Feanil Patel: Those are all the topics for today.

Kyle McCormick: All right.

Feanil Patel: What's a good come?

00:35:00

Kyle McCormick: what was the decision?

Feanil Patel: The maintenance board is going to be we're gonna use that for planning. So we'll be like, okay, we know that We know there's a Ubuntu upgrade coming. We should sequence those. This is about when they should happen Etc, but then Hey, we're dropping support for node 18. That's gonna be a Decker ticket. So if you need to follow operationally something is going away. You should always follow the depart board. So if maintenance results in operational impact, we should be creating deprecation tickets for that operational impact.

Feanil Patel: This is for the process stuff.

Feanil Patel: Nice. Thank you.

Feanil Patel: cool

Feanil Patel: That's everything. Does anybody have any other topics to bring up today?

Feanil Patel: Adolfo, do you want to stick around for a second and I could talk through nude 20 and sort of what the state of that is. I'm just like…

Adolfo Brandes: Yeah, sure.

Feanil Patel: if there's comms we need to be doing after the conference.

Adolfo Brandes: Yep.

Feanil Patel: All right. Thanks everybody. right

Adolfo Brandes: Okay, I'm looking at the top ticket.

Meeting ended after 00:36:46 👋