This is the recap from the meeting on 2021-11-30.
Topics discussed
Working groups
-
Marketing — 00:03:30
Multiple blog posts and tweets have been posted announcing the Open edX December 14 Virtual Event.
In the future, the marketing working group updates will be provided by @Eden_Huthmacher.
-
Release — 00:06:28
The BTR working group are hard at work releasing maple. Some issues remain open. More testing is needed from the community.
Ecommerce on Maple is currently broken in multiple ways, mainly because of identity verification, cyber source, and custom payment backends. Many of the issues faced can be found on the BTR working group board.
There are more planned efforts to report the problems that were faced by creating more detailed tickets in the BTR working group project to describe and target the different problems faced.
The issues the BTR working group are facing right now are crucial and require additional help from the community. These issues risk delaying the Maple release or delivering one which members might not wish to upgrade to (in the case of a broken ecommerce).
Unfortunately, these issues are quite difficult to reproduce and resolve because it’s already difficult to set-up ecommerce. In order to help reduce these difficulties, a suggestion was provided regarding creating a shared ecommerce instance.
In addition, people usually have expertise about one or a few more of those components, but never the full stack. Although that’s also common among core committers, a suggestion was provided to utilize the core contributors in these tickets. Core committers most likely have worked with ecommerce previously and are more knowledgeable of the platform to set things up, debug, and resolve them.
In order to better utilize the efforts of the core contributors, the utilization of the core contributors sprints was suggested. Accordingly, a first sprint is being prepared to prioritize some issues to said core contributors.
There are also discussions regarding marketing the need for experts on certain repositories by making them more appealing, regardless of the difficulties.
There are still some concerns and requests, though, for a clear definition as to what extent the Maple release would resolve some of the ongoing ecommerce issues.
-
Frontend — 00:37:45
No updates reported.
-
Core Contributors — 00:38:05
@nizar is joining the core contributor program as a project manager and a forum moderator. Congratulations
@antoviaque and @sarina rewrote the declaration of commitment to the core contributor program. The language was updated, mainly, to indicate the document is about the code-base and the program and not the entity. In addition, changes were made to include all core contributors, non technical contributors and core committers, in the document’s language.
-
Data — 00:39:35
There were some discussions regarding using Figures as the default data analytics tool-set for the open distribution.
A question remained regarding who will continue maintaining Figures on an on-going basis.
Events
-
Open edX Virtual Event in December — 00:03:30
The next Open edX Virtual Event is Tuesday December 14th.
Be sure to register to the event.
Projects
-
Core Contributors Sprints — 00:44:40
The next step, after the discussions which were taking place, will be to make a quick proposal where the sprint can be focused around unblocking the Maple release.
There are efforts regarding scheduling a sprint for the next couple of weeks.
-
-
Node.js 16 — 00:46:07
No significant updates.
-
-
Django Backend APIs: Django Signal Events, Django Filters — 00:46:25
The first pull request which uses filters has been opened to the edx-platform. A similar path is taken, as before; three filters are being presented to be tested and used.
People are encouraged to take a look at the implementation and review the changes.
-
xAPI/Caliper, OEP-26 — 00:48:30
The members involved are waiting for Maple to be released so people can start using the implementation and providing feedback.
-
MySQL instead of MongoDB — 00:54:46
Another pull request has been merged.
@dave will be providing additional asynchronous updates regarding the removal of MongoDB on this discourse thread in case you’re interested in following up on this topic.
For now, the item will be removed from the agenda until there are some major updates.
-
DEPR impediments - any tickets that need real-time discussion?
-
Entrance Exam - how can we remove this unsupported feature from the core? — 00:50:21
It is necessary to check in with another core contributor affected by the issue to see if they can take in ownership of the ticket. Reaching out to the deprecation working group about this ticket was also considered.
The entrance exam, specifically, is considered a little hard to replace because it’s pretty old and unrefined; this makes the feature not quite wanted by the community.
Concerns were raised regarding features being deprecated/removed without a replacement. However, others voiced their concerns about the liabilities unmaintained features or pieces of code bring.
-
Replace the Ecommerce Application — 00:52:00
The reporter of this deprecation ticket has left edX.
According to the contributors, edX can choose not to use ecommerce; however, the deprecation of ecommerce requires the feedback of the community. The deprecation ticket can be utilized to retrieve that feedback, though.
Originally, there was an interest in a replacement which would be easier for everyone to work with and would work better for the community.
-
Video Recording
The chat log can be found on the meeting’s agenda.
Participants
@Andres.Aulasneo
@antoviaque
@dave
@djoy
@e0d
@Felipe
@nedbat
@nizar
@omar
@pdpinch
@regis
@sarina
@Zia_Fazal
Next meetup
Tuesday December 21st at 15:00 UTC (Timezone converter).
Details and draft agenda on the Github board.