October 13, 2021

Time/Place

This meeting is held virtually via Zoom, with an open channel for chatter on Slack. Anyone is welcome to join. Here is the info:

• Time: 1:00pm Eastern Time US (UTC-5)
• Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/97345581392
• Join us on the Slack Islandora 8 Channel https://islandora.slack.com/archives/CM5PPAV28
  • Chair rota
    • Mark
    • Melissa
    • Eli
    • Rosie
    • Seth
    • Danny 🪑

Attendees

• Seth Shaw, Alan Stanley, Adam Vessey, Alexander O'Neill, Bethany Seeger, Drew Heles, Eli Zoller, Jared Whiklo, Jordan Dukart, Kristina Spurgin, Kyle Huyhn, Melissa Anez, Nat Kanthan, Sarah Goldstein, Kirsta Stapelfeldt

Agenda

1. Announcement: Ansible roles are in Islandora Deprecated.

2. Proofread: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E7jf-MuKo_z4GLKxC25idS9qB8nlCo3DmZ2LZGAxw5o/edit

3. Semantic versioning Islandora releases when, why & how.

4. Issue Roundup no new

5. PR Roundup

   i. https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/pull/1911

   ii. https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/pull/1912

   iii. https://github.com/Islandora-Devops/isle-dc/pull/185

   iv. https://github.com/Islandora-Devops/islandora-playbook/pull/203

   v. https://github.com/Islandora-Devops/islandora-playbook/pull/204

   vi. https://github.com/Islandora-Devops/isle-dc/pull/186

6. Review DevOps Repo descriptions/dependencies

(Last 10 Minutes): Roundtable

Minutes

1. Announcement: Ansible roles are in Islandora Deprecated.

• Feedback that we should provide better announcements to the community over changes like this.
• Nick Ruest concerned with open pull requests and the Git history, but unclear about whether or not this actually happens.
• Nat has some concerns - we can't install roles separately now, which limits the ability to use the roles modularly. Some of the galaxies were not downloaded frequently, but the idea was that we could use them in different contexts which we can't do now. Advocates for keeping it separate for these customized deployments of books.
• Jared found the playbook difficult for local development and did not think people were still using Playbook roles for deployment, but rather using ISLE and manual installations. Using the separate roles adds complexity and difficulty for those that are using this for pure development.
• Eli asks: 'are we supporting ISLE and the Playbook and what are their separate purposes'? This is something that has been heavily discussed. It's not clear if either are being fully maintained right now.
• Rosie agrees that it's been really hard to maintain and get PRs in with the playbook because for it to pass CI you need to tweak things to pull to PR branch and then remember to go back. These roles are very useful in staging and production where you just need to deploy. One of the challenges is that we've tried to make both ISLE and Playbook meet everybody's needs, from those developing locally, to those running a staging server, to those evaluating the system. There were a lot of decisions made to make everybody happy that made nobody happy.
• Seth - we are dependent upon the community and community interest in the deployment methods, and deployment methods is hard.
• Jordan - we need to focus on what active contributors want and use.
• Seth - I used to use the playbook, but can't get Virtual Box working, so can't use it.
• Eli - we forked the playbook and roles and are using it to deploy locally for dev environments, staging, and production.
• Seth - we are manual installation in production because we found them not to be reliable.
• Alex - my worry about both playbook and ISLE is papering over technical complexity around software (thinks like Karaf and Blazegraph). We have built a thing that is too complex for most of us to understand.
• Nat - we use playbook.
• Jordan - it seems like ISLE is not heavily used.
• Alan - I use ISLE for a lot of sites.
• Bethany - History was heavily rooted in Islandora 7x and the goal was to help those institutions with limited technical resources.
• Rosie asks: How hard is installing an Islandora 7 (Legacy) vs manual installation of Islandora (2.x.x)
• Conclusion: Kirsta will draft a survey that Rosie and Seth will review prior to being sent to determine current deployment methods.

1. Proofread: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E7jf-MuKo_z4GLKxC25idS9qB8nlCo3DmZ2LZGAxw5o/edit

• Thanks to Rosie for putting together. All will comment. What do we do re: ISLE? We need to test on ISLE. Rosie will send it out with an acknowledgement that installation instructions will be forthcoming.

1. Semantic versioning Islandora releases when, why & how.

• In the proposal, things were left pretty loose. It is really up to the module maintainers' discretion. Bugfixes we obviously want in sooner rather than later. Non-breaking feature updates. In TAG, we've had a discussion about how frequently people should be doing releases if they have new features. We don't have good guidelines. There was an open PR about updating documentation, but we don't know what's in there. Seth says Danny thought we would do releases six months after the most recent Drupal core release (but this was just discussion and has never been formalized). Doesn't need to be formalized now. We should start these discussions. Major releases should have RCs and some formalization around major releases. Drupal 10 is out in June (we'll need to move to Islandora 3x) - unclear if we'll need a major release. We need to document new features at the release point. Jordan wonders about maintainers - we need to review maintainers. Emerging discussions: a) we need to figure out who the current maintainers are, and b) we need to determine a workflow around releases that ensure testing, RCs, documentation, etc.

• Jared - are we still considering the Drupal.org releases? The releases we're thinking of as Github releases, or are we not as concerned about this now? Rosie - Who has credentials to push branches to the Drupal Gitlab? Who has these permissions? Jared has permission for the main Islandora project. Everything else is under Danny. Jared can push new branches and cut releases for Islandora proper, but not defaults or anything else.

Topics for Agenda next week

1. Who are current maintainers
2. What are workflows around releases that ensure testing, RCs, documentation, etc.
3. Drupal.org - when and how?
4. From Adam - Automatically create box? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66261101/using-vagrant-on-github-actions-ideally-incl-virtualbox/66261102#66261102

Pull Requests

• https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/pull/1911 - are we no longer doing base box? Does anybody want to maintain it? Eli says it's not hard to do. What are we going to provide people? If we are going to say to people you can spin up an Islandora out-of-the box with playbook then we need to do this, but we're in a quandary because Danny is the only one with access. Are we committing to maintaining it into the future? Put this on hold until we've had these discussions. Jared says that ISLE is where this shines, and where Ansible is harder. ISLE works on Windows. Alex says it's correct to not have the default behaviour of Ansible should not require a virtual box. If we did want to distribute a base box, we could distribute is as a Virtual Box image instead of making people use vagrant, meaning that Rosie's PR still holds water. Eli will review.

• https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/pull/1912 - Seth provided a review and feedback. Some of what we discussed could feed into making this document even better. We can have some discussion on how to release in this PR, or it could be a new PR.

• https://github.com/Islandora-Devops/isle-dc/pull/185 - no hands up for review on this? Seth has done manual updates of this kind, so he knows it would be useful in production. Bethany notes that having 'how to test' would be useful in the PR. Seth will comment back asking for steps to test. Do we have the PR template on ISLE-DC? Bethany will make sure the PR template gets to this repo.

• https://github.com/Islandora-Devops/isle-dc/pull/186 - Don fixed some warnings that appear, but unclear how to reproduce the errors (and confirm that they are no longer there). Seth is asking for testing instructions.

• https://github.com/Islandora-Devops/islandora-playbook/pull/203 - documentation of the deprecation of the Islandora 8 box. Eli just merged.

• https://github.com/Islandora-Devops/islandora-playbook/pull/204 - Jared will review. Fixes the large pull. Rosie tested it but can't merge it.

Review DevOps Repo descriptions/dependencies