The Build/Test/Release working group is currently brainstorming to produce a medium- to long-term vision. What do we want to achieve in the next six months in terms of Open edX releases? Dream big!
I’ll start with my own Christmas list
An Open edX platform running on a modern stack, including Python 3.7, Django 3 and Elasticsearch 7 on Ubuntu 20.04. A predictable release schedule and roadmap. Releases should not be like Christmas presents: surprises are overrated, spoilers and advance notice are great. An easy to navigate Open edX operator handbook that describes how to launch, upgrade and operate an Open edX platform.
We’re currently finishing the process of switching essentially all of the services over to Python 3.8, this should be done before the Python 3.5 EOL on September 13th.
With the Python 3.8 upgrade almost done, we’ve started working on Django 3.0 compatibility. But due to short support windows, we don’t plan to use non-LTS Django versions in any Open edX named releases. So the next version that we plan to support is 3.2 (due in April), but Koa should be mostly compatible with 3.0 and maybe even 3.1.
The Elasticsearch 7 upgrade is in progress for all relevant services, we hope to have that done in the next month or two.
We plan to have Koa using Ubuntu 20.04, but most of the work for that won’t start until the items above wrap up.
I just moved our upgrade project tracking page to a public location, you can now follow along here.
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toxinu
(Geoffrey L. (OpenCraft) - opencraft.com/help)
7
That sounds exciting! Thanks for sharing these details @jmbowman.
Thanks for these great news @jmbowman. I can’t help but think that it would be amazing to have such a page where all Open edX developers publish what they are working on. That would tick item on my wishlist.
Note that the internal target date for edX teams to complete the Ubuntu and MySQL upgrades is mid-November. So those may not make it into Koa - if the plan is Nov 9th for the Koa master branch cut.
(Not being a Grinch - but the elder sibling telling you what’s real. )
In that case we would have to postpone Koa, as Lilac would come out later than the Ubuntu 16.04 support window.
Speaking for myself here: I think we really want to avoid postponing releases, so we could make the code freeze on Nov. 9th and backport the Ubuntu 20.04 changes before the Dec. 9th release date. But then we will really need to have those changes before the end of November.
We’re currently finishing the process of switching essentially all of the services over to Python 3.8, this should be done before the Python 3.5 EOL on September 13th.
The current status of the Python 3.8 upgrade is at https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AC/pages/1773306098/Python+3.8+Upgrade . It was delayed a little because we were late in discovering that we needed to upgrade from celery 3 to 4 (due to use of the “async” keyword in older versions of its kombu dependency in code that wasn’t called in tests), but about half of the 3.5 services have been upgraded to 3.8 already and the rest of the services should be shortly.
The good news from the delay is that all the edX services are now using the latest version of celery.
Right. For now, let’s use the Upgrades wiki to keep track.
However, that page is manually updated.
Internally, we are using a New Relic dashboard to keep track. If @nberdnikov’s able to help us with Management of the Ubuntu upgrade as well, we can ask her to maintain a wiki for us (like she’s now doing for the Python 3.8 work).
An Open edX platform running on a modern stack, including Python 3.7, Django 3 and Elasticsearch 7 on Ubuntu 20.04.
A predictable release schedule and roadmap. Releases should not be like Christmas presents: surprises are overrated, spoilers and advance notice are great.
An easy to navigate Open edX operator handbook that describes how to launch, upgrade and operate an Open edX platform.
Note that the internal target date for edX teams to complete the Ubuntu and MySQL upgrades is mid-November. So those may not make it into Koa - if the plan is 
)