Opencast Proposals
All important decisions for Opencast have to be made on list. For more details, please have a look at out documentation about decision making.
The following list contains a list of passed proposals for reference.
Passed Proposals
Allow merges of admin interface and editor
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Jun 21, 2024
Hi everyone,
the admin interface and editor are part of Opencast and follow the same
set of rules when it comes to reviews. But right now we still always
wait for a review of the merge into Opencast after a release.
I hereby #propose to drop this requirement and allow committers to merge
a new release themselves **if and only if** the pull request for the new
release targets `develop` or the latest release branch.
If someone wants to bring a new release of the admin interface or
the editor to an older version of Opencast, that should still get a
proper review. The same goes for external components we import and
which do not follow the same rules like Paella Player or Studio.
This proposal passes if no one vetoes it until
Fri Jun 21 06:09 PM CEST 2024
–Lars
Release Manager Selection Process
Proposed by Greg Logan gregorydlogan@gmail.com, passed on Tue, April 9 2023
Hi all,
As we've seen over the last few years, there isn't exactly a ton of competition
to be a release manager. Because of this, the voting requirement as outlined
in our RM docs[1] seems a bit silly. I #propose that we allow election via
acclamation[2] in the case where there are no other volunteers. This would
remove the requirement for the vote until there is more than one set of
candidates.
Since it's Easter break and lots of folks are on holidays, let's vote for
longer here. Proposal closes on EOD 2024-04-09
G
1:https://docs.opencast.org/r/13.x/developer/#release-manager/#appointment-of-next-release-manager
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acclamation, "Uncontested Election"
Removal of Paella 6 in OC 16
Proposed by Greg Logan gregorydlogan@gmail.com, passed on Wed, Feb 14 2024
Hi all,
With the freshly filed PR[1] upgrading the Search Index, we have broken compatibility with most existing integrations.
I say most, since I updated Tobira, and Paella 7 as part of that work. If you're integrations depend on endpoints in
the /search/* namespace, please test!
With that in mind, Paella 6 would be broken by this pull request, and I'm #proposing that we remove it completely with
Opencast 16. As far as I know all development is against Paella 7, and Paella 6 is already disabled by default.
G
1: https://github.com/opencast/opencast/pull/5597
Deprecate Theodul with Opencast 12
Proposed by Greg Logan gregorydlogan@gmail.com, passed on Fri, July 1 2022
Hi all,
After a discussion today at the technical meeting, I'm going to propose
deprecating Theodul with Opencast 12. It's no longer the default, and actually
causes problems in some situations[1]. It's also no longer being developed.
If this passes then Theodul could be removed from the codebase with Opencast
13. If this is a problem for your installation, now would be the time to speak
up!
Proposal closes EOD 2022-07-01
G
1: https://github.com/opencast/opencast/issues/1749
Note: Deprecation actually happened in Opencast 13, with removal in Opencast 14.
Opensearch Support
Proposed by Greg Logan gregorydlogan@gmail.com, passed on Wed, June 22 2022
Hi all,
As we probably all know, Elasticsearch did some goofy things with their
licensing, and a fork (Opensearch) ended up starting up. Opensearch 1.x is
protocol compatible with Elasticsearch 7 series releases, of which 7.10.2
appears to be the last one with the older license. There is an Opensearch 2.x
branch which is not compatible[1].
Since long term we're probably going to be migrating to Opensearch, and
Opensearch is drop-in compatible I'm going to file a pull request with the
appropriate bits to enable proper testing going forward. The pull request for
this is forthcoming.
I'm also going to #propose that we add formal support for Opensearch to
Opencast 12.0, deprecate Elasticsearch support in Opencast 13.0, and finally
remove it in Opencast 14.0. This gives us the motivation to get 2.x support
going sooner than later so we don't get hugely behind, while also giving us
fallback where we can stick to an older version of Opensearch if we don't
actually get that done.
Proposal closes END 2022-06-22
G
1: https://opensearch.org/faq/#q1.9, also personal testing
Drop official MySQL support
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Wed, February 16 2022
Hi everyone,
since I'm testing database things once again, I noticed that more and
more our infrastructure is set-up to test with MariaDB (or now
PostegreSQL) and no longer with MySQL. We have MySQL left in none of our
deployments and I feel like something could break compatibility at any
moment right now and no one would notice during a release cycle.
Overall, the situation is similar to back when we decided to no longer
officially support PostgreSQL. It technically works and should continue
to work, but no developers actually test against it and it could easily
break without someone noticing.
That is why, similar to the old decision, I would like to #propose to:
- officially mark MySQL it as unsupported
- explain that it should technically work, but we do not test it
- explain that the set-up should be similar to MariaDB but may differ
slightly and we have no documentation for that
Of course, also similar to PostgreSQL, we can always decide to support
it again later, if interest picks up and the database landscape changes.
–Lars
PR and release process changes
Proposed by Greg Logan gregorydlogan@gmail.com, passed on Thu, 17 Jun 2021
Hi all,
As discussed at the technical meeting today, I'm proposing a few changes to our
current process:
1) Intra-organization reviews should be permitted. This means that, for example, Elan can now review Elan's PRs.
Considering our current developmentresources, it's not reasonable to continue with the current methodology - I'm ending
up being the primary non-Elan reviewer, and that's bottlenecking our reviews. This change also has far less impact
given that the larger committer groups are generally supporting multiple separate installs, leading to less drive for a
single institution's goals to be pushed into the project.
2) PRs must still be discussed at the technical meeting prior to merge. Yes, this imposes a potential 1 week delay in
merging a PR, but it also gives you (committers) a chance to object to a potential merge. It's also a *very* good
reason to show up at the technical meeting.
3) Releases shall be on Wednesday, rather than Tuesday. I'm not sure if we've formalized that releases are on Tuesday
currently, but doing them on Wednesday means that last minute PRs can be discussed on Tuesday, then immediately merged,
rather than waiting around for a full week and missing a release.
WIth this change, I'd also like to modify the committer expectations: We used to say 20% of your time. That would be
nice, but it's obviously not happening. Instead, I propose that committers be expected to review 2-3 PRs per week.
Proposal closes EOD 2021-06-18 UTC-6.
G
Closing old Pull Requests
Proposed by Katrin Ihler ihler@elan-ev.de, passed on Mon, 9 Mar 2021
Hi everyone,
I'd like to establish a rule for closing old pull requests, since we
have some of those lying around for quite a while and I'd like a
guideline. I propose the following:
A pull request can be closed if neither the pull request creator nor
another person working on the PR has addressed any review findings
within 6 months. (Note that this is optional, so we don't _have_ to do it.)
A review would be considered addressed if the PR is amended or the
finding is disputed. So a discussion would also count, but something
like "I don't have time for this right now" wouldn't.
Closing a PR doesn't constitute a rejection, it can be re-opened at any
time once the person responsible can give it attention again.
As usual, if no one objects, this proposal passes after the next 72 hours.
Best regards,
Katrin
External API deprecation policy
Proposed by Maximiliano Lira Del Canto mliradel@uni-koeln.de, passed on 24 Feb 2021
As we talked in the draft thread and there are no more comments, this is the
final version of the proposal about the deprecation of the old
versions in the external API.
External API deprecation policy:
- Any minor version should be supported at a maximum of 2 (Two) Opencast
Releases since the release of the next minor version of the API.
Example: If Opencast 10 has API v1.3.0 and Opencast 11 comes
with API v1.4.0, the API v1.3.0 will be supported until Opencast 12)
- Deprecating a version does not require removing it from the code base,
just removes the guarantee that it will be present in the next version.
- When an API version is set to be deprecated needs to notify the users
with a warning that they should start to use the newest version of the API.
A custom HTTP header when the flagged version is called plus a warning in
the website docs.
- In the case of a new major version, the immediate old version should
be deprecated 4 (Four) next releases of Opencast.
- Updating Opencast don't mean a new API version
- This proposal is only for the external API
Example of deprecation policy:
Release Notes
Proposed by Greg Logan gregorydlogan@gmail.com, passed on Tue, 26 Jan 2021
Hi all,
As discussed in the dev meeting, I'm going to #propose that new features (ie,
things that should be listed in the release notes) should create a new file
under docs/guides/admin/releasenotes containing at least one line regarding the
change. At release time, rather than the release managers combing through the
commits we can just cat the files together and have something sane.
Suggested format: A single line short description, unless that description
exceeds 120 characters, in which case multiple lines wrapping at 120. If for
some reason your features require a larger blurb that's ok too - this should be
rare, so the RMs can check and move things about. We will be checking before
we commit the tag anyway, right? :)
Short example:
- My spiffy new feature, which lets Opencast run on a 386 in 64k of RAM.
Long example:
- My short description
My longer feature description
---------------------------------------
Lorem ipsum....
Proposal passes EOD 2021-01-26 UTC-6
G
Release Process Update
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Thu, 24 Dec 2020
Hi everyone,
based on the discussion on list and in the technical meeting, Lukas and
I have created a proposal for changing our release process and applying
a new set of rules. You might notice that we have deliberately not
included all of what we discussed but hopefully only what can get
consensus for now.
Apart from some minor changes, the main difference in here is that we
transition from making a distinction between feature and bug fix to
defining a set of rules that hopefully ensure smooth minor updates.
If this proposal passes, we can work for there and refine this but we
hope that this is a good starting point.
## Release Schedule
- Major releases happen every half year
- Minor stable releases are cut monthly monthly
- Minor legacy releases are cut on demand
- Urgent minor releases may be cut if necessary
- Feature freeze for a major version should be about a month before the
release
## Accepting patches for minor releases
- All patches need to be discussed in the technical meeting
- Minor changes should not take much time
- Protects against problematic changes in minor releases
- Exceptions may be discussed if necessary (e.g. version bumps for
libraries on develop)
- Patches for minor releases must not
- Modify any existing database tables
- Modify the indexes or otherwise cause re-indexing
- Require a different ActiveMQ configuration
- Modify existing translations
- Patches for minor releases must
- Work with the same configuration within a major version
## Be Pragmatic
- If everything is broken, don't let rules hold you back…
- There is always a special case: If in doubt talk to the community
and find a solution that works.
- Communication is key: If you think you need to break a rule,
coordinate that with the community.
## Additional suggestions
- Patches should be applied to the latest release branch if possible
- Avoid the risk of breaking legacy due to less testing
- Avoid unnecessary merge conflicts
- Patches should avoid unnecessarily large changes in any release branch
As usual, if no one objects, this proposal passes in three days.
Best regards,
Lars
Relocate build infrastructure to main repository
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Thu, 17 Dec 2020
Hi everyone,
as you are all aware there are multiple community members working on
and maintaining infrastructure for different binary builds. For
example, Greg is doing the Debian packages.
All these are currently maintained in separate repositories… somewhere.
Greg and I would like to bring these back to the main repositories to
not loose track of what's available and where things are living.
But maintaining these sometimes requires quick actions and we cannot
really create a pull request every time a release is cut and then wait
a week or two before it's merged until we can release the packaged
version.
That is why I #propose to allow for maintainers of these areas to work
on these directly without running through our usual pull request and
review rules.
For example, that could mean that I could quickly update the RPM spec
file if necessary while I would not be allowed to just modify the
codebase (e.g. modules/*) on my own.
Initially, I #propose the following areas and maintainers:
Debian build architecture Greg Logan
RPM build architecture Lars Kiesow
docs.opencast.org build architecture Lars Kiesow
This doesn't really change anything at the moment since we are already
in control of these parts right now. The difference would be that it's
not maintained somewhere any longer but everyone knows where to find
things and (potentially) how contribute.
Of course, we can extend this whenever we need to to include more/less
scripts. Though I suggest that we keep this to what we officially
support.
As usual, this proposal passes unless someone vetos it in the next 72h.
Best regards,
Lars
JDK Support
Proposed by Greg Logangregorydlogan@gmail.com, passed on Wed, 11 Nov 2020
Hi all,
We have some old rules[1] around which JDK is supported by which version of Opencast, but obviously they are somewhat out of date at this point. With that in mind, here's what I'm proposing:
Opencast 8: Formal support for JDK 8, and nothing else
Opencast 9: Formal support for JDKs 8 and 11, with a provisional "it should work" for newer versions[2]
Opencast 10: Formal support for JDK 11, with a provisional "it should work" for newer versions
Going forward, I would like to see a given version of Opencast support the latest two LTS JDKs as a general rule.
#proposal passes if no objections are raised by EOD 2020-11-11
G
1: https://docs.opencast.org/develop/developer/#proposal-log/#requiring-java-18-for-30
2: Note that JDK 11 is currently broken, at least until https://github.com/opencast/opencast/pull/2009 gets merged
OSGi Annotations and Configuration
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Wed, 7 Oct 2020
Hi everyone,
I hereby #propose that for all new code added to opencast
- OSGi annotations should be used instead of XML files for specifying
components and dependencies.
Reason: This is far less error prone. Even on today's Review Friday,
we had problems with the XML files again. No wonder if you write
these manually.
- @Activate and @Modified should be used for reading and updating
configuration instead of implementing a Managed Service.
Reason: Managed services are usually unnecessary and often make
runtime updates to services problematic (see webinar below)
If there is a reason to go against these rules, it must be clearly
stated on a pull request.
OSGi component annotation example:
https://vt.uos.de/e5msw
If you want to know more about the service configuration and see
annotations in action, watch the “Opencast OSGI Configuration“ webinar:
https://video.ethz.ch/events/opencast/webinars/7261ea70-ce36-4e17-8634-963966311028.html
This proposal passes on Wednesday evening if no one objects.
Best regards,
Lars
JPA, PostgreSQL and DDL-Scripts
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Wed, 30 Oct 2019
Hi everyone,
tl;dr – we want to replace the manually maintained database set-up
scripts with JPA's auto-generation capabilities, properly including
optimizations like indices, constraints, … while re-introducing
proper support for PostgreSQL.
We recently looked into re-introducing proper PostgreSQL support for
Opencast, updating the driver [1], … – thanks to Beuth University – One
task left now is to properly initialize the database.
While we could now write our own initialization script for PostgreSQL,
much like `docs/scripts/ddl/mysql5.sql `, we would like to spare us as
community the double-effort and instead tackle an alternative route we
have been discussing in the community for a long time now: Making
Opencast generate a proper database schema on its own.
To give you a few more details, if you do not use the DDL scripts, but
just configure a database and start Opencast, you will already see a
database schema being auto-generated and everything (kind of) magically
works.
However, due to a mix of historical reasons and some deliberate
negligence on our side as developers – why do the JPA stuff properly if
we have to write the DDL script anyway – the auto-generated schema is
problematic for production since a lot of optimization is missing.
We did already take a look at this, evaluating the amount of work [2]
and fixing a few of the problems [3] but there is much more work to do.
The first pull request [2] also outlines in much more detail the
current state, what the problems are and what we have to do …if you are
interested.
Now, finally, we would like to continue this work. First, we are
seeking help from others, fixing the issues, but more importantly,
testing the work with your database set-ups.
Additionally, for us, this work only makes sense if we get a proper
PostgreSQL support out of it. Overall, I hope this will make supporting
all databases easier since we do not need to write set-up SQL anymore,
but for now, we do still need to write upgrade SQL statements and
officially re-adding support for PostreSQL, this means that we need to
write upgrade scripts for that as well – we are looking into fixing
that problem as well, but that's a separate project ;-)
Does anyone have objections to this plan?
Does anyone want to help (with development or testing)?
Best regards,
Lars
[1] https://github.com/opencast/opencast/pull/1103
[2] https://github.com/opencast/opencast/pull/1105
[3] https://github.com/opencast/opencast/pull/1133
Pull request reviews
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Thu, 7 Feb 2019
Hi everyone,
right now, we have 43 open pull requests. 23 of these are open for over
a month. 12 are open for over two month. I find this a bit problematic.
That is why I #propose to relax the requirement of reviewers as follows:
Pull requests with no major modification and no review for over a
month may be reviewed by developers from the same or related
organizations.
Reasoning:
I find our review process to be very valuable since it prevents a lot
of bugs from getting into the code base in the first place. The state
of develop is proof that it works great: Most of the time, you can spin
up develop and use it without major issues. This state is completely
different from Opencast develop back in 1.4 days.
Nevertheless, it also puts a burden on the community since it sometimes
makes it very hard to fix problems. Not only do you need to write the
patch, but you also need to find someone completely unrelated to review
this. This can be quite hard in some scenarios. Example: SWITCH tasks
me with fixing a bug. This means that SWITCH is out of the loop for
reviews and ELAN e.V. is out as well. But not only that. We are related
to Osnabrück University so e.g. Rüdiger cannot review my patch and also
e.g. Michael is working for plapadoo and ELAN so he is out as well. In
short: ~80% of the regular reviewers are forbidden from taking the
review.
This example shows that our current rules can be problematic. This is
not generally the case, but this can be the case.
Going back to the original reasoning for this rule, it was an
intentional decision to prevent a specific institution from just
forcing code into Opencast without community involvement by creating a
pull request and having a colleague simply merge it.
Lifting the embargo after a month should have more or less the same
effect. The community has a month to notice and complain about any
given patch. Hence, no institution should be able to just push any code
into Opencast. If no one complained or commented for a month to raise
their concerns, it's unlikely that anyone really objects to the change
and it just becomes a matter of a technical review (does the code
have any problems). For that, any second developer should hopefully
suffice.
Please let me know if you have any objections to this change.
As usual, this proposal will pass in 72h if no one objects.
Best regards,
Lars
Automate translation merges
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Wed, 29 Sept 2018
Hi everyone,
a few weeks ago we discussed on the technical meeting that it would be
great if we could automatically merge back translations on a regular
basis.
That is why I hereby #propose:
Updates to translations for existing languages may be pushed into
Opencast's repository automatically.
Note that adding or removing languages will still need a regular pull
request and a review
If this proposal passes, I can implement the automation.
–Lars
No more merge tickets
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Thu, 17 May 2018
Hi everyone,
tl;dr
I hereby #propose to drop the practice of keeping a Jira ticket for
synchronizing merges
Today we had a short internal discussion about Opencast's merge tickets
where we found that all of us here at Osnabrück think that we should
drop the practice of keeping them.
The original goal for those was to prevent two developers to merge
things simultaneously causing conflicts for each other. Nowadays most
people use Github's merge button anyway which makes this far less
problematic since developers do not need to keep track of the upstream
branch but can just merge which will just magically work as long as
there is no conflict.
Some people still merge via command line but they are usually those who
can handle conflicts anyway ;-)
What also plays into this proposal is that we do not have that many
merges. So this is not that big a problem in the first place. And for
the few occasions where there are many merges (e.g. I remember some
merge sprints before a feature freeze) we always coordinated those
efforts anyway (who is taking which review, what's the progress, …) so
that not having a merge ticket wouldn't be a problem here either.
From experience I can say that even for cutting a release I probably
could have worked without a merge ticket with no problem: I pulled the
version I was cutting into my local branch anyway, so I could work
there and additional merges would not have interfered.
Finally, if there is a rare case where it actually makes sense to block
a branch, I deem us flexible enough to shout out on list, which may even
work better since the message is not drowned by hundreds of similar
messages :)
Best regards,
Lars
Migrate Docker Images to Quay.io
Proposed by Matthias Neugebauer matthias.neugebauer@uni-muenster.de, passed on Tue, 1 May 2018
Hi,
as you might have noticed, there are currently no images available on Docker Hub
for Opencast 4.3. The problem is, that Docker Hub itself uses an old version of
Docker to build new images (version 17.06.1 is from mid 2017). When Opencast 4.3
was released, I prepared new Dockerfiles and also fixed an issue that resulted
in unnecessary large images. Now the problem is, that this requires (only for
building images) a feature that was only added to Docker 17.09 in September
2017. In addition, I found Docker Hub to be really slow and unreliable. Builds
start minutes after triggering and take a long time to complete. And there are
times when nearly all builds simply fail, e.g. because the base image could not
be downloaded or the machine used for building run out of disk space. All things
that should not happen leaving me quite frustrated with Docker Hub.
While Docker Hub is the "official" (more like default) image registry, there
exist multiple alternatives. Quay (https://quay.io/), for example, is another
bigger registry now run by CoreOS (owned by Red Hat). The service is free for
public images and offers some additional features compared to Docker Hub (e.g.
image vulnerability scanning). In my initial tests, I was really pleased. I
don't know what they are doing, but image builds start quick and take under 6
minutes! My local builds take 15-20 minutes :D
To come to the point: I herby #propose to further test out Quay and, if this
service performs well, migrate the Docker images to this registry. For the
tests, I would need to connect the opencast-docker repository to Quay, for which
I don't have the permissions. Also, the migration would leave the already
existing images on Docker Hub, but users would be advised to use the new
repository ("quay.io/opencast/allinone" instead of "opencast/allinone").
Best regards
Matthias
Drop Undocumented Workflow Handler
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Fri, 10 Nov 2017
Hi,
lately I discovered a couple of undocumented and probably unused
workflow operation handler, for example the 'failing' operation to name
one of them. All of these are not really useful in their current
undocumented form. That is why I hereby #propose to
drop all workflow operation handler still undocumented at the end of
the year.
If this proposal passes, I will create and publish a list of all
operations which would be dropped in their current state. If someone
still wants to keep any of them, the only thing they need to do is to
write a short documentation page for those operations. A task easily
done.
That way we may get rid of some unused, unnecessary old operations
while ensuring that all of the actually useful ones are documented and
thus usable without special inner knowledge of Opencast.
Regards,
Lars
Changing Translation Sources
Proposed by Sven Stauber sven.stauber@switch.ch, passed on December 20, 2017
Dear Opencast Developers
I hereby #propose to add an additional rule to our development process as
described on [1]:
Adding or changing translation sources is not allowed in release branches
(implying that pull requests doing so need to be directed to the branch
develop).
Best regards
Sven
[1] https://docs.opencast.org/develop/developer/development-process/
Crowdin Acceptance Policy
Proposed by Greg Logan gregorydlogan@gmail.com, passed on November 17, 2017
Hi all,
Per the discussion in the meeting today, we need to set a policy regarding what
is expected of our Crowdin translators prior to joining the translation team.
My proposal is that they must write a brief, understandable sentence regarding
why they want to help translate Opencast via the Crowdin UI. This is an
optional field in the workflow where they request to be a translator (ie, no new
tools or fields) which is sometimes filled in, but mostly left blank. Something
like
'I want to help translate $project into [language]'
would be sufficient. This filters out the bots, yet is simple enough that
someone with Google translate ought to be able to work something out. Once this
passes I will update the Crowdin and Opencast docs regarding the requirements,
and then we should be good to go.
Proposal closes EOD 2017-11-17.
Rename Matterhorn Repository To Opencast
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on July 13, 2017
Hi everyone,
I think we have reached a point where people are wondering what the
hell matterhorn is ;-D
That is why I #propose to rename our official repository from
matterhorn to opencast:
old: https://bitbucket.org/opencast-community/matterhorn/
new: https://bitbucket.org/opencast-community/opencast/
This proposal will end on Thu Jul 13 16:00 CEST 2017
Regards,
Lars
Criteria For Inclusion Of Translations
Proposed by Sven Stauber sven.stauber@switch.ch, passed on April 28, 2017
Dear all,
There are currently no rules about the criteria needed for a translation to be
included or excluded from the official Opencast releases.
I hereby propose the following rules:
1. A not yet supported translation is included into the next major release if
it is translated to at least 90% at the time when the release branch is cut.
The release managers will take the review if no other reviewer can be found.
2. A not yet supported translation may be included in the current release
branch anytime if it is translated to 100% and a reviewer is found. It will
then be part of the next minor release and major release if feasible
3. An endangered translation is a supported translation that is translated less
than 80% at the time when the release branch of the next major release is
cut. The release managers will publish a list of endangered languages if any
4. An endangered translation will be removed with the next major release if it
is not saved. The release managers take care of the removal in case no other
person will
5. An endangered translation may be saved by reaching at least 90% translated
until at least two weeks before the release date of the next major release
and a reviewer is found
6. Considering the percentages of being translated, Crowdin acts as reference
7. Considering the dates of the release cuts of major releases, the respective
releases schedules act as reference
Best,
Sven
Make Maintenance Releases Easier
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on April 24, 2017
Hi everyone,
over the last years, I have cut a lot of Opencast maintenance releases.
The process is to announce that a release will be cut, create a release
candidate and wait 72h without veto to actually release.
I have always sent out the voting mail as required by our release
process and I can always count on the usual response: No reply.
This is actually not very surprising since for example now for the
2.3.3 release, people have either already tested the latest state of
r/2.3.3 or are involved in the next big release already.
In short this means that we always have a three day waiting period in
which basically nothing happens. That is why I would like to change the
process for *maintenance releases* in the following way:
A release manager may cut new maintenance releases at any time
without prior release candidate.
He should openly announce the date for a new release a week before
the release or at any earlier point in time.
Note that this will also allow a release manager to release as fast as
possible if necessary (e.g. security fix) since the announcement is not
strictly required but only a strong advise.
This should lessen the work for the a release managers and will enable
more agile release processes. We also should not really loose any QA
work since everyone knows when releases will happen and people can
always test the latest state of a release branch which will become the
new release.
This proposal will not affect major releases where release candidates
with three days testing period would still be required.
I hope you agree with this change,
Lars
Minor documentation changes do not require JIRA issues or PRs
Proposed by Stephen Marquard stephen.marquard@uct.ac.za, passed on June 9, 2017
To reduce the overhead involved in improving our documentation, I #propose that
minor fixes to documentation may be committed to either maintenance branches or
develop without requiring a JIRA issue or pull request.
Markdown docs can be edited directly on bitbucket (and git should we move to
that), which is a very fast and convenient way for developers to fix
documentation.
Constraints: documentation fixes committed in this way should be minor changes
only; for example fixing typos, layout, formatting, links or small changes to
existing content, but no significant new content (which should continue to go
through the usual review process).
Requiring Java 1.8 for 3.0
Proposed by Greg Logan gregorydlogan@gmail.com, passed on June 12, 2017
Hi folks,
For those following along, James Perrin has identified an issue where 3.0
requires Java 1.8 at runtime. We haven't formally included that
requirement for 3.0 yet (it's already required for 4.0), but I hereby
propose that we do. No one seems to have noticed this requirement was
already present in 3.0 (not even me!), even at this late in the release
cycle which speaks, I think, to the already widespread adoption of Java
1.8. We would also have to go back and redo all of our testing were we to
change the problematic jar to an earlier version, which would be
unfortunate for our release timelines.
This proposal closes EOD 2017-06-12 UTC -6, at which point I should be able
to cut the release.
G
Change version numbers scheme
Proposed by Rüdiger Rolf rrolf@uni-osnabrueck.de>, passed on Mar 23, 2017
Hi all,
as we currently approach a new release, I would like to raise a question
when it comes to our version numbers: du we need a version number that
consists of three parts?
At the moment we have
<main-version-number>.<major-release-number>.<minor-release-number>.
With our current release process, with a new release every 6 month we
would always increase the <major-release-number>. Additional to this we
have the <minor-release-number> for bug-fix-releases, whenever they are
needed.
But we do not have a process for increasing the <main-version-number>.
Okay 2 years ago we were lucky enough that two long running sub-projects
that replaced all UIs in one release were finished. That was an obvious
reason to increase the main version. But will we ever be that lucky
again? Is only replacing all UIs justifying a main version increase?
If I look at the project history we had several milestones that could
have justified a new main version, like a nearly complete refactoring of
the backend in 1.4, the video-editor in 1.6, the Karaf update in 2.1,
the External API in 2.3.
*So my #proposal would be to remove the first part of the version number
for all upcoming releases. So our next release would be 3.0 and the
release at the end of the year it would be 4.0. *
We would follow other projects like Sakai in this change - although
without the confusing part of going from 2.9.3 to 10.0, where they
removed the first number.
What are your thoughts?
Regards
Rüdiger
Officially declare the Admin UI Facade as internal API for exclusive use by the module matterhorn-adminui-ng
Proposed by Sven Stauber sven.stauber@switch.ch, passed on December 16, 2016
Dear all,
I hereby propose to officially declare the Admin UI Facade as internal API for
exclusive use by the module matterhorn-adminui-ng.
Reason:
The Admin UI Facade is essentially the backend of the Admin UI. While it would
be technically possible to use this API for other purposes, this would introduce
dependencies to components other than the Admin UI.
Allowing such dependencies to come into existence would cause changes to the
Admin UI Facade to potentially break other (possibly unknown external)
components. Hence, we would need to announce, coordinate and discuss changes to
this API to not break dependencies to components we potentially don't even know.
This would unnecessarily slow down the future development of the Admin UI. In
addition, Opencast 2.3 introduces the External API which has been explicitly
designed to meet the requirements of an API used to integrate other components.
Changes needed:
The documentation needs to reflect that the Admin UI Facade is an internal API
that will be changed without prior announcement whenever needed without
respecting dependencies other than the Admin UI itself and therefore people
shall not use this API for integration purposes.
Best,
Sven
Opencast Next: Code Cleanup
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Thu, 7 July 2016 15:21:19 UTC
Hi everyone,
a while ago we discussed on the technical meeting that we would like to
remove some old code from Opencast since these parts do not work
properly (sometimes not at all) or are unused.
Why cleaning up? To name some reasons:
- Less code to run (less memory, faster start-up)
- Less things to compile (faster build)
- Less dependencies
- People do not accidentally stumble upon broken things
- Less work for maintenance
And now here is what I #propose to remove and a reason why I think this
should be removed. I already took the comments people made in the first
draft [1] into account, although I still dared to include the two last
items but this time, hopefully with a convincing reason for why they
should be removed.
1. Old Administrative User Interface (matterhorn-admin-ui)
The reason for this should be obvious: We got a new one. The old one
has not been tested for the last three releases, is not linked
anywhere anymore and is partly buggy due to changes to Opencast. To
maintain two interfaces for one thing do not make sense.
2. Hold-state Workflow Operations
These do not work with the new interface any longer and the concept
has since been replaced by the actions you can perform on archived
material.
3. CleanSessionsFilter
Old temporary bug fix. For more details read the thread on our
developer list.
4. Republish Workflow Operation Handler
It can be removed since it has been replaced by a flag on
the publish operation in 2.x.
5. Old workflows + encodings
We got new ones. These were only left because of the old ui.
6. Old player (Flash in engage ui)
Flash is dead. We have the new player and Paella.
7. Most of shared_ressources
Almost everything in here belongs to old user interfaces.
8. matterhorn-engage-player
This is the old player Flex project. Iam not even sure it can still
be compiled.
9. matterhorn-test-harness
Old integration tests
10. matterhorn-mediapackage-ui
Old UI ressources
11. matterhorn-manager-*
Old, outdated configuration modification via web ui. This was never
used and would need a major update to get it working again at all.
12. matterhorn-load-test*
Some tests. I have never seen them executed by anyone.
13. matterhorn-holdstate-workflowoperation
Workflow operations requiring a hold state which does not exist
anymore with the new admin interface.
14. matterhorn-deprecated-workflowoperation
The name says everything. This includes the download DVD operation.
15. matterhorn-annotation-*
This should not work with either of the current players anymore.
16. docs/jmeter, docs/scripts/load_testing
Configuration for a performance testing tool. Not used for a long
time and not up-to-date.
17. Everything unused from:
https://data.lkiesow.de/opencast/apidocs/deprecated-list.html
E.g. FunctionException and ProcessExecutor(Exception)
18. matterhorn-webconsole
Karaf comes with a web console. We do not use our old implementation
anymore.
19. matterhorn-mediapackage-manipulator
Rest endpoint for media package manipulation. It's not used anymore
except by components to be removed.
20. matterhorn-search-service-feeds
Broken implementation for RSS/Atom feeds
21. matterhorn-caption-* and embed operation
Service for converting different subtitle formats and operation to
embed these subtitles into the media files. This is *not* player
caption support. If required, FFmpeg can be used for conversion
between several subtitle formats. Asked on list [2], no one uses
this.
As indicated before, points 20 and 21 had some comments for leaving them
in which did not convince me to not propose this. “Instead of removing
it, fix it” is an easy thing to say but sadly requires ressources.
Keeping it, announcing it as features and then tell people that it is
not working only afterwards is a bad thing and I would like to avoid
that.
Note that all the code is still in our history so that we loose nothing
if we want the old code back.
Please feel free to indicate if this action is fine for you or if you
want to keep some of the marked code. Please provide a reason if you do.
Best regards,
Lars
[1] http://bit.ly/28YOEZ1
[2] http://bit.ly/28Ztlt8
This proposal has passed with these additional corrections:
Hi,
we discussed this on today's technical meeting and I'm slightly
changing the proposal:
20. Let's remove matterhorn-search-service-feeds only after September
1st which is a realistic time to get things into the next Opencast
release. If someone has fixed the issue by them, we will, of
course, keep it.
This change takes into account that some people have said they are
interested into fixing that module, but will make sure that it's
removed if no one fixes it to not have an advertised but broken
feature.
21. I will be looking into adding subtitle support in a sensible way
before removing the matterhorn-caption-* modules or at least
clarify if they can still be used.
Regards,
Lars
Hi James,
a couple of days, I talked to someone saying that he will soon provide
a patch adding exactly this functionality. The holdstate operations are
definitely broken due to their UI.
My suggestion for a compromise here:
- Remove them if that patch for archiving the options is released
- Remove them if no one fixes them in time (September 1st) for 2.3
If you want to bring them back later, we always keep the code in our
history.
Regards,
Lars
> Hi,
> I would like to keep 2 and presumably 13. Both Manchester and AFAIK
> Cape Town have use cases for hold states since there is still no
> mechanism for passing WF configuration options from one WF to another.
> Regards
> James
The patch has already been published.
Opencast Community Repository Owners
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Fri, 13 May 2016 18:41:52 UTC
Hi,
today, in the technical meeting, we shortly discussed how to handle
requests, problems, etc regarding the other repositories we are hosting
under the umbrella of the Opencast community:
https://bitbucket.org/opencast-community/profile/repositories
While we have people who care about the official Opencast repository as
well as rules about what may be merged, who may merge things, … we do
not have that for other repositories and for some it's very unclear.
That is why I would like to propose that every repository under the
umbrella of the Opencast community needs to have a “project owner”
being responsible for that repository. Usually it should be the one
requesting that repository, but of course it can be someone else known
in the community.
I would also like to propose that if there is no one willing to take up
the responsibility to take care of a repository (ownership) if an old
owner leaves, the repository should either be removed or marked as
deprecated and moved to a separate section if so requested.
Finally, I would like to propose that we use the new “project” feature
of BitBucket to group the repositories into the groups:
- Opencast
- Contrib
- Adopters
- Deprecated (<- to be created if needed)
Currently, all repositories are in one big project.
Regards,
Lars
Rename Opencast Mailing Lists
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Thu, 14 Apr 2016 00:00:00 UTC
Hi everyone,
traditionally, we have the three mailing lists:
- matterhorn@opencast.org (development list)
- matterhorn-users@opencast.org (user list)
- community@opencast.org (more or less announcements)
Recently, though, we have seen especially the last two list being used
for user questions and problems. That is not surprising as we dropped
the name “Matterhorn” and new users do not know what that the list
matterhorn-users is meant for questions about Opencast.
That is why I would like to rename these lists to
- dev@opencast.org or development@opencast.org (I prefer the short
name but don't have very strong feelings about that)
- users@opencast.org
- announcements@opencast.org
Together with the already existing security-notices list, this gives
these lists a very clear meaning. It would also have the benefit that
users only interested in general announcements could subscribe to one
list only which would likely be a very low-traffic mailing list.
Additionally, this would make it sufficient to send announcements to
one list, instead of sending it to all three lists.
To prevent general questions on the announcements list, I suggest we
grant posting rights to board members, committers or other people who
have or had a role in our community only. I don't think we need to be
too strict here but should make sure that people understand what this
list is for.
Finally, for the sake of our current members, I would suggest that we
forward the mails to the old addresses for at least until the end of
the year, if that is possible.
Best regards,
Lars
Documentation Pull Request Merge Order
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Thu, 25 Feb 2016 20:52:00 UTC
Hi everyone,
as discussed in this weeks technical meeting, I hereby #propose to
allow out-of-order merges of documentation pull requests in the same way
we have this exception for bug-fixes.
to be precise, I #propose to change the development process docs for
reviewing and merging [1] in the following way:
[old]
- Pull requests for bug fixes (t/MH-XXXXX-...) may be reviewed and
merged out of order.
[new]
- Pull requests for bug fixes or documentation may be reviewed and
merged out of order.
Regards,
Lars
[1] https://docs.opencast.org/develop/developer/reviewing-and-merging/
Removing instances of print statements with a style rule #proposal
Proposed by Greg Logan gregorydlogan@gmail.com, passed on Wed, 12 Feb 2016 12:00:00 UTC
Hi folks,
I noticed in a recently review that there are still System.out.println
statements in use in our codebase. I was surprised, because thought we had
previously implemented a checkstyle rule which would have banned those
statements! I hereby #propose that we implement the changes outlined in
https://opencast.jira.com/browse/MH-11222, and remove these statements in
favour of logger statements. I also propose that we add this rule to the
checkstyle ruleset so that we don't have to deal with this again going
forward. Proposal closes EOD 2016-02-03.
G
How to release a new Opencast version…
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, passed on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 12:54:51 UTC
Hi everyone,
serving as co-release manager for two versions of Opencast, I noticed
that our current release process has some aspects of the release defined
in a way that is more hindering than helpful and I want to #propose a
slight change to these recommendations.
I hereby #propose:
1. Get rid of the `master` branch, make `develop` the main branch.
2. Do not use the --no-ff flags for merges
3. Do not create versions/tags in a release branch. Separate them.
Reasoning:
1. The short explanation whould be: When did you explicitely checked
out `master` last time? People rarely do that. If I want a specific
version, I use the tag, if not I want the release branch or
`develop`.
If you think about it, then the whole reason for `master` in GitFlow
is to always provide the last stable version to users who just check
out the repository and do nothing else. The problem with Opencast is,
that we support multiple versions at the same time. If in a couple
of weeks 1.6.2 is being released, it is the latest stable. Is it? If
I check out `master`, however, I will still get 2.0 as we cannot
merge 1.6.x afterwards. While you can grasp the reasons behind this,
it is a bit confusing for users and it is much easier to just tell
them to use the tag to check out a specific version.
That it, if they do not use the tarballs from BitBucket anyway.
2. First of all, most people seem to be using BitBucket for
auto-merging and it does not use --no-ff. So we are not really
consistent anyway. Being consistent and using --no-ff would mean to
forbid the usage of the BitBucket merge.
Second, have a look at the confusing mess that are the current
branches (I tried to find something in the visualization a while ago
but gave up). It would be much cleaner to try using fast-forward
merges. So instead of using non-fast-forward commits I would argue
that we should instead try to use as many fast-forward commits as
possible.
3. Once we decided to have the tags in our branches like this:
---- A ---- B (tagged) ----- C ---- D -->
A is the commit containing the version that is decided to be
released. B is the tagged version. It is exactly the same code as A
except for the pom.xml versions that are modified. Finally C then
reverts B as the modified version should not be part of the release
branch, .... After C, the code is basically A again except for the
history (which we later need to merge which can be problematic). D
would then be the next “real” commit, meaning the next fix.
Much easier to handle would be the following structure:
---- A ---- D -->
\
B (tagged)
You do not have to revert that commit, you do not need to merge the
easily conflicting pom.xml changes and in the end, you would anyway
check out the tag using git checkout <tag> if you want that
specific version
Branching structure:
To have a complete overview, this is what the new branching structure
would look like:
develop --*--*--*--*--*----*--------*--------*---->
\ / /
r/x.y.z *--*--*---*--*--*--*--*--*---->
\ \
* x.y.z-beta1 * x.y.z-rc1
Regards,
Lars
Moving away from the 3rd party scripts
Proposed by Greg Logan gregorydlogan@gmail.com, passed by Fri, 24 Jul 2015 16:45:40 UTC
Hi folks,
As it stands right now we depend on the 3rd party tool script to
install a great many of our 3rd party dependencies. These are
utilities like tesseract, ffmpeg, sox, etc. This script is maintained
by Matjaz, in his own time. I'd like to take a moment to thank him
for a doing a great job on a particularly annoying aspect of
supporting our work! I know it hasn't been easy, especially
supporting vast number of different OS versions!
With the release of 2.0 I noticed that our 3rd party tool script is
becoming both a little out of date, and difficult to maintain. I took
a quick look around and it seems like *most* of our dependencies are
available from normal distribution repositories for Debian based
systems, and I'm told that there is a similar situation for Redhat
based systems. I am unsure of how many of our users are running
Matterhorn on Mac, but I would hope that our developers who are
working on Mac would be able to provide instructions and/or binaries
for those users. The only dependency where there might be a universal
sticking point is ffmpeg (due to patent concerns), however ffmpeg
builds a full static binary with each release, so I assume we can
either depend on this and/or cache them somewhere.
What this means is that we can potentially remove the 3rd party script
from our repository. I hereby #propose we find a way to do that,
which would remove the 3rd party script from the repository and
replace it with a number of new steps in the install documentation.
G
Status of youtube in 2.0 and #proposal to change the default workflow
Proposed by Rüdiger Rolf rrolf@Uni-Osnabrueck.DE, passed on Sat, 13 Jun 2015 14:15:55 UTC
Hi list!
There was some discussion in the DevOps meeting yesterday if the
Youtube distribution would work or not. I offered to check this.
The good news first: IT WORKS!
Just follow this manual and your Matterhorn - ups Opencast - is ready
to distribute to Youtube.
http://docs.opencast.org/r/2.0.x/admin/modules/youtubepublication/
The bad news: The default workflow definition does not really support
the publishing on Youtube, as only one video file could be published
by the current WOH.
https://opencast.jira.com/browse/MH-10920
The reason is simple and the fix would be too. But there are some
options to fix this:
1. Remove the option to distribute to Youtube from the default workflow
definition, as the complicated configuration would have to come
first anyway.
2. Only let "presenter" or "presentation" be published to Youtube. We
would need a new youtube tag and add this to the compose operation
and the youtube operation.
3. Introduce the composite operation to the workflow definition and
publish only the resulting single stream to Youtube.
4. Upgrade the WOH to support publishing of multiple files.
I would say that option 4 could be 2.1 goal, but not for 2.0.
I would #propose to go for option 1, as nobody can use Youtube
out-of-the-box anyway. And the admin could then setup an appropriate
Youtube workflow for their needs too.
Regards
Rüdiger
Episode DublinCore Catalog
Proposed by Karen Dolan kdolan@dce.harvard.edu, Passed on Sat, 30 May 2015 12:39:05 UTC
Dear Opencast-ees,
The following proposal addresses MH-10821[1]. An issue that exposes a
know long time ambiguity regarding metadata and the ingest service.
The reason that its a proposal is that it normalizes the handling of
inbound episode catalog metadata in the ingest service.
1) A new configuration parameter, boolean, for the Ingest Service. The
config param identifies if episode metadata precedence is for
Ingestee (i.e. Opencast system) or the Ingester (i.e. Capture
Agent).
For example: at our site, the scheduling entity is the metadata
authority. All updates are made to the Scheduling endpoint. The
Capture Agent always has stale episode catalog metadata. At other
sites, updates are made on the Capture Agent directly. The
community default can be for priority to the Capture Agent.
2) All Ingest endpoints perform the same consistent process to ensure
that an episode catalog will exist, manually or automatically
provided.
3) The process performs the following...
3.1. Gather data
- Check if inbound media package contain a reference to an Episode
DublinCore catalog and if that catalog contains a title.
- Check if the inbound media package contains a title attribute.
- Check if the Workflow service has a reference to the mediapackage's
Episode Dublin Core catalog
- Check if the Scheduler service retained a reference to the event's
Episode Dublin Core catalog
3.2. Use config param to prioritize action on acquiring an Episode dc
catalog for the media package
If Capture Agent metadata takes precedence:
- Take the inbound Episode dc catalog, if it exists
- Take the Episode dc catalog from the workflow service, if it
exists
- Take the Episode dc catalog from the scheduler service, if it
exists
- Create an Episode dc catalog from the title in the media
package,, if it exists
- Create an Episode dc catalog using a default title (i.e.
"Recording-1234556XYZ")
If Opencast metadata takes precedence:
- Take the Episode dc catalog from the workflow service, if it
exists
- Take the Episode dc catalog from the scheduler service, if it
exists
- Take the inbound Episode dc catalog if it exists
- Create an Episode dc catalog from the title in the media
package, if it exists
- Create an Episode dc catalog using a default title (i.e.
"Recording-1234556XYZ")
I'll start a pull for the above, and appreciate any thoughts.
Regards,
Karen
[1] https://opencast.jira.com/browse/MH-10821
Dropping Taglines
Proposed by Greg Logan gregorydlogan@gmail.com, Passed on Fri, 29 May 2015 16:19:09 UTC
Hi folks,
I hereby propose that we drop the practice of having taglines. I
propose this because we don't have a place in the new admin UI to put
them, nor have I ever heard any of the adopters make use of it. I know
we don't use it as a committing group, which means that *no one* is
using them.
G
Wiki Cleanup
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, Passed on Fri, 24 May 2015 11:36:49 UTC
Hi everyone,
since we partly switched to our new documentation [1] I would like to
make sure that the old and mostly outdated documentation goes away so
that no one stumbles upon that. When I had a look at the wikis we
currently have I noticed that most of our 17(!) wikis have not been
touched in years and can probably go away.
Here is a list of our wikis and what I #propose to do with/to them:
Keep (maybe clean-up a bit):
- Matterhorn Adopter Guides
- Matterhorn Developer Wiki
- Opencast Matterhorn D/A/CH
- Opencast Matterhorn Español
- LectureSight
Export as PDF to archive the contents and then delete:
- Matterhorn Release Docs - 1.0
- Matterhorn Release Docs - 1.1
- Matterhorn Release Docs - 1.2
- Matterhorn Release Docs - 1.3
- Matterhorn Release Docs - 1.4
- Matterhorn Release Docs - 1.5
- Matterhorn Release Docs - TRUNK
Keep until 2.1 is out then export as PDF and delete:
- Matterhorn Release Docs - 1.6
Just delete:
- Analytic video annotation
- Infra
- Matterhorn Documents
- Opencast Community
Please let me know if you agree or disagree with this proposal.
Regards,
Lars
[1] http://documentation.opencast.org
Jira Clean-Up
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, Passed on Fri, 8 May 2015 11:52:16 UTC
Hi everyone,
as discussed in the technical meeting, I hereby #propose:
The “Blocker” and “Release Blocker” severity status are more or less
redundant. As part of cleaning up Jira, let us remove the “Release
Blocker” severity in favor of “Blocker”.
As footnote, some statistics: Since the beginning of 2014, 70 Release
Blockers have been files in Jira while mere *8* Blockers have been
files.
Regards,
Lars
Opencast Documentation
Proposed by Rüdiger Rolf rrolf@uni-osnabrueck.de, Passed on Sat, 02 May 2015 14:43:28 UTC
Hi all,
Tobias, Basil, Lars and I discussed status of the current migration of
the Opencast (Matterhorn) documentation to GIT. We still see some open
issues that need clarification so we would like to propose the
following points:
*1. Formating and Hosting of the Documentation *
We want to use https://readthedocs.org to or a similar service create
a more appealing HTML version from the Markdown of the documentation.
The documentation will be versioned there so that for older versions
the documentation is still available. By default the "latest" version
is shown. The versions of the documenation will be generated based on
the release branches.
*2. Structure of the Documentation*
We see the documentation in*Git *separating into 3 sections:
- /Administration Guide/: with information about the installation,
configuration, customization and integration. This will be the part
of information by an administrator to setup
Opencast.
- /Developer Guide/: All information related to implementation
details of Opencast, so that this will be updated in a pull request
(API changes, module descriptions, architecture). The development
process documents should also go here as only committers usually
should change these.
- /User Guide/: Documentation of the (new) Admin UI that was already
started by Entwine and the Engage UI (especially Theodul Player).
This guide should only describe options available on the UIs.
Within the *Wiki* we still see the need for 2 sections:
- /Developer Wiki/: Proposals, working documents and meeting notes
will be kept here so that anybody can edit these. So information
not to close to any existing implementation that might still be in
a process of discussion can be found here.
- /Adopters Wiki/: This can be the place where adopters share their
best practises, configurations, hardware recommendations,
third-party software documentation etc. Again anyone can contribute
to this wiki.
The difference between the Wiki and Git is in the first line that the
Git documentation should become a quality assured ressource for
Opencast users. The Git documentation should be reviewed within the
release process and it will be part of the review process of a pull
request, to make sure that the needed documentation changes have been
contributed too.
The Wikis on the other hand should be a more open platform where
everybody can contribute and users might find cookbooks to enhance
their system, or they can share ideas.
So now we would like to get your opinion on this proposal.
Thank you,
Rüdiger
Requirement Specification
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, Passed on Thu, 16 Apr 2015 15:55:31 UTC
On list or IRC we often see that people do not really know the current
requirements for a specific version of Opencast Matterhorn. Of course
there are the pom.xml files specifying internal dependencies, but there
is nothing for 3rd-party-tools, ...
It would be nice to add a file specifying these requirements in a
format that is easy to parse and can hence be used for automatic
scripts to generate dependency lists, ...
That is why I hereby #propose to add a requirements.xml file that
specifies the requirements for Opencast Matterhorn:
- Required tools including versions
- Which modules require which tools
- Which modules conflict with each other (negative requirement)
This is mainly what is not specified by the pom.xml files yet.
Jira Clean-Up (Tags VS Labels)
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, Passed on Thu, 19. Mar 2015 15:43:20 UTC
…then hereby I officially #propose removing the labels from Jira.
For more details, have a look at the mail thread at:
https://groups.google.com/a/opencast.org/forum/#!topic/matterhorn/vIdWQkZmbdQ
FFmpeg Update
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, Passed on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 22:12:18 UTC
Looking at the FFmpeg project for the last two years, you will notice
that they developed a pretty stable release cycle with a release of a
new stable version approximately every three month.
To stop us from having to propose an update again and again, I hereby
propose the following general rule for our support of FFmpeg:
A Matterhorn release will oficially support the latest stable
version of FFmpeg released at the time the release branch is cut and
all other FFmpeg versions with the same major version number released
afterwards.
For example, for Matterhorn 2 this would mean that we will officially
support FFmpeg 2.5.4 and all later 2.x versions like 2.6 which has
been released on the 7th of March or a possible 2.7 onece it is
released. We would, however, not necessarily support an FFmpeg 3 as it
*might* come with an interface change that *could* break compatibility.
That obviously does not mean that older versions of FFmpeg just stop
working. In fact, most parts of the default Matterhorn configuration
should at the moment still work with FFmpeg 1.x but we will not test or
fix compatibility problems.
Proposal Log
Proposed by Lars Kiesow lkiesow@uos.de, Passed on Sat, 14 Mar 2015 16:35:08 UTC
It would be wonderful if we had a central place to look up the proposals
that have passed.
That is why I hereby propose that:
- We create a proposal log in our new documentation containing all
proposals that have passed on list.
- A proposal will become effective only after it is written down in
that log. That should usually be done by the person who sent out
that proposal.
This will, of course, not affect the existing decision making rules
(proposal on list, marked with #proposal, lazy consensus after three
days, no -1, ...)