Developers Meeting on Thurs, May 9, 2024

Time/Location

09 May 2024 from 14:00-15:00 UTC

Location: https://lyrasis.zoom.us/my/dspace?pwd=RTk4QUhISnhPRi9YenVrTFJKbDllQT09 (Meeting ID: 502 527 3040).  Passcode: dspace

• More connection options available at DSpace Meeting Room

Agenda

• Discussion Topics - If you have a topic you'd like to have added to the agenda, please just add it. 
  1. 8.0 Testathon Wrap-Up (and continued testing)
     1. Per the discussion in last week's meeting, Tim created a Google Document for us to verify which features have been tested. Please update this with features you've tested, so that we have a better sense of which of these features need more attention.
        1. DSpace 8 Feature Testing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A2V_1CWtFPhD1LDbZEZc6xSCn5tC7pPojkqGZ48-SAY/edit
     2. Testathon so far has found a lot of stability bugs (pages hanging and/or not loading). Some include...
        1. Bugs reported via Testathon:
           1. https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/labels/testathon
           2. https://github.com/DSpace/dspace/labels/testathon
  2. OR2024 Developer Meet-Up & Q&A Workshop
     
     1. Wiki page to begin adding topics for discussion: OR2024 DSpace Developer Meet-Up and Q&A
  3. Ongoing Discussion: High CPU with DSpace 7 SSR: https://groups.google.com/g/dspace-tech/c/t4H3jJPq0Ck   
     1. Please suggest improvements/changes on our Performance Tuning DSpace docs (or send to Tim privately)
     2.   Add configuration to disable inlined CSS in SSR: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/pull/2067
     3. Possibly exclude some components from SSR?  E.g. DSpace-CRIS excludes the Search component from SSR as these are not necessary for SEO.  (Need to verify this has no negative impacts on accessibility or similar.)
     4. Is there a way to use Apache "mod_cache" to cache SSR generated pages?
        1. May have a negative impact on download/view statistics (in Solr Statistics) as hits to the Apache cache would not generate view events. We'd need a different way to send these view events to REST API.
  4. DSpace 7.x Maintenance
     1. Should we backport the new /api/security/csrf  REST endpoint used by https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/pull/2886  ?   See also REST Contract: https://github.com/DSpace/RestContract/pull/259
  5. (Other topics?)
• Board Review & assignments:
  • Backlog Board - Are there any tickets here stuck in the "Triage" column?  We'd like to keep this column as small as possible.
  • 8.0 Project Board - Assign new PRs to volunteers to code review and/or test.
  • 7.6.x Project Board - Assign new PRs to volunteers to code review and/or test.
• Upcoming Topics: (Let us know if there are topics you want to discuss in future weeks)
  • None at this time

Attendees

• Tim Donohue 
• Holger Lenz 

• Art Lowel (Atmire) 

• Andrea Bollini (4Science)

• Giuseppe Digilio (4Science) 
• Paulo Graça
• Mark H. Wood 
• Grazia Quercia (4Science)
• Corrado Lombardi (4Science) 
• Julian Timal (eScire) 
• Martin Walk 
• Melissa Anez 
• Oliver Goldschmidt 
• Hrafn Malmquist 
• Pascal-Nicolas Becker 
• Pierre Lasou 

Current Work

Project Boards

• DSpace 8.0 board: https://github.com/orgs/DSpace/projects/27
• DSpace 7.6.x board: https://github.com/orgs/DSpace/projects/29

To quickly find PRs assigned to you for review, visit https://github.com/pulls/review-requested  (This is also available in the GitHub header under "Pull Requests → Review Requests")

Goals for 8.0

This were decided by Steering in their meeting on June 28, 2023.

1. Move forward major features which missed 7.x. 
   1. COAR Notify support (4Science & Harvard): https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/8120 
      1. Development proposal page: Implementation of the COAR Notify protocol in DSpace 8
   2. OpenAIRE integration with notification broker/claim service (4Science)
   3. Porting "REST-Based Quality Control Reports" from old REST API to new one. (U of Laval, Canada)
   4. Duplicate Detection in Submission ported from DSpace-CRIS (The Library Code)
2. Include new features which empower users in the admin UI.  Make things easier for Admins.
3. Accepting community contributions of any 6.x features which missed 7.x
4. Improve documentation, training to allow for greater community contributions.  (Ease setup/install/customization, etc.)
   1. Per DSpace 7 WG meeting on June 29, 2023, this may include dependency upgrades/maintenance (Angular, Spring, Solr, Tomcat, etc).  May also include necessary code updates/refactors to ease in ongoing maintenance. 
5. Release Goal: May 20, 2024
6. In parallel to 8.0, proof of concepts / planning regarding modularization:
   1. Angular : library-based architecture proposal (4Science)
   2. DSpace Preservation-enabled Storage via OCFL (Lyrasis, post-8.0)

Goals for 7.6.2

Deadline is TBD for 7.6.2

• Bug/security fixes only.  Release will occur when sufficient fixes have been made to warrant a release.
  • New "themeable components" (for dspace-angular) are allowed in bug fix releases, provided that they don't significantly modify component behavior or similar.
• Bug fixes should have one Pull Request 
  1. A PR against either the "dspace-7_x" maintenance branch OR the "main" branch.
  2. We will automatically generate a PR against the other branch using the "port to [branch]" labels & the "Port merged Pull Request" GitHub Action
  3. (In the case of complex bug fixes, it is possible this automatic port action will fail. In that situation a manual port PR may need to be created.)

Try "Pull Request Trading" for a quicker review

Do you have a PR stuck in "under review" that you really want to see move forward?  Or maybe it's someone else's PR but you want to get it more attention?

See Trading reviews on Pull Requests for how to get immediate attention to that PR!

Notes

Timelines

Discussed new timelines for version 8.0 release, bug fixes, and documentation: 

• Bug Fix PR Creation Deadline: Friday, May 3 May 17 
• Bug Fix PR Merge Deadline: Friday, May 10 May 24
• Final Documentation & Release Week: May 13-17 May 27-31
• 8.0 Release Announced: Monday, May 20, 2024 June 3

The timelines are still tentative and may be adjusted according to progress with open tasks.

Testing

The team is in the process of testing DSpace 8 features not tested during Testathon:

• A number of bug tickets were created in GitHub and assigned 
• (High priority) tickets need to be closed out on GitHub before version 8 can be released

Went through and discussed list of bugs on GitHub that are currently unassigned:

• Identified and discussed high priority bugs
• Item version input form is not displayed in DSpace 8, redirect doesn't occur properly to submission form – assigned to Guiseppe Digilio

Discussed backend issues currently not resolved:

• Discussed minor issues (e.g. COAR Notify)
• Discussed high priority issues
  • Potential security issue around RSS feed exposing items that are fully restricted (#9511) – Tim Donohue will see if he can find time
  • 9499 Previously failed ZIP exports will also fail subsequent ZIP exports – Andrea Bollini (4Science) will work on it, provided that Atmire is not already working on
  • Item Counts (#9437) – When turning on counts, it breaks the community list – Truly high priority? – Tim Donohue will work on it
• Release date will depend on how quickly the Dev team can get bug fixes done

Open Repositories 2024

Discussed the organization and plan for the developers workshop (DSpace at OR2024#DSpaceDeveloperMeet-UpandQ&A)

Tim Donohue will send a list of topics to the OR workshop organizer to forward to workshop attendees

High CPU Usage 

Discussed the problem of high CPU usage 

Feedback/Suggestions are welcome (Performance Tuning DSpace)

Michał Dykas (and team) has suggestions on how to optimize performance, will share with Dev team at next weeks meeting (5 min), will also proceed with documentation to get started

DSpace 7.x Maintenance

Tim is planning to to create a PR to backport, unless there are objections

Board Review & assignments:

Discussed and assigned high-priority items that need reviewer assignment 

Anything on this board that is currently not high priority may get dropped from version 8.0 because of time restraints