SolidOS Team Meeting

# SolidOS Team Meeting * Date: 10.25.2023 18:00 (UTC+2) * Call: [https://meet.jit.si/solid-operating-system](https://meet.jit.si/solid-operating-system) * [Previous meeting link]() * [Next meeting link]() * Chat: [https://gitter.im/solidos/solidos](https://gitter.im/solidos/solidos) * Repository: [https://github.com/solidos/solidos](https://github.com/solidos/solidos) * Meetings home: [https://solidos.solidcommunity.net/public/SolidOS%20team%20meetings/](https://solidos.solidcommunity.net/public/SolidOS%20team%20meetings/) ---- ## Present attendees * Jeff, Alain, Noel, Jon, Tim, Matthias, Rahul, Michal ### Scribes * --- ## Topics ### Round Table #### Jeff - Continued working on engaging the community of practicioners. - Has been following the migration from NSS to CSS. #### Alain - Had a first meeting about the migration from NSS to CSS. I think we have to go slowly to make sure we don't break anything. My main concern is maintenance because CSS seems to be on closed maintenance and not open source. - Noel: What do you mean that it's not open source? - Alain: I mean that it's difficult to get contributions merged, as was discussed recently in the mailing list. - Tim: I asked to have turtle pretty-printed but they didn't accept it. - Alain: One of the problems is that they only want to implement what's written in the spec and nothing else. - Continued working on the append issue for the chat. Not sure if there has been a change to the spec to allow PUT on append. - Tim: Yes, there has been a modification to the spec. - Alain: Ok, but I'm not sure if it works with CSS. It also needs to be changed in the [test suite](https://github.com/solid-contrib/test-suite). #### Jon - Made some progress on the onboarding documentation (added styling, and added solid-client to fetch the documentation links from our pod): https://solid-contrib.github.io/getting-started/ - Timea added Discussions to our Github repo page, and I started a Wiki: https://github.com/solid-contrib/getting-started - Now I am adding a form to submit documentation links, so that we can add new links from the page, rather than directly on the pod - Have we ever talked about how the scribe should take notes? - Noel: I don't think we've ever discussed it, but I think it depends on the style of each scribe. Some people prefer to write a summary, others write everything anyone says verbatin. #### Matthias - I think we don't have a test server to try CSS, so I can provide some to test if everything is working on the latest version. - Alain: One problem is that some people are using your server, so it should be stable. We shouldn't mix test server with production servers. - Matthias: Yes, I'm running the test server in a different instance. - solidweb.me: 6.1.0 - teamid.live: 7.0.1 #### Tim - Looking forward to the new version of SolidOS that fixes the login problem. - Alain: I haven't updated the server because I'm blocked with the chat issue with the append. - Tim&Jeff: We think we should not block the release for that, so we should push a new version with the auth fix. #### Noel - I've been looking at an issue about writable profiles, what's the current status of that at the moment? - Jeff: At this point, you should look at seeAlso links and at foaf:primaryTopicOf predicate and find one that is writable. #### Rahul - Has written [Solid-PREP](https://cxres.github.io/solid-prep/protocol) spec. - Will present PREP at httpbis in IETF 118. ### Technical topics #### CSS - Alain: One of the issues with CSS is that every release the format of the config changes, so it's very easy to make human error by writing it by hand every time. - Tim: Yes, for example in NSS the config file remains the same most of the time, so it's not as common to have breaking changes. With CSS it's also difficult to follow in which versions the changes happened and keep up with that. Michiel de Jong suggested forking it and use a community fork. - Noel: I like Michiel's idea, but I'm not sure it can work in practice because I don't think there is anyone familiar with the CSS codebase outside of their core team. - Alain: We could learn the codebase and become familiar with it, the problem is that there is nobody with resources to do it (I've been doing it for free for 4 years). - Tim: There are some grants like NLNet or the web foundation could fund some of this work. - Rahul: It's not only a matter of involvement, the CSS codebase is considerably more complex than NSS so it's not as easy to understand. - Tim: What makes it so complicated? - Rahul: One part is understanding ComponentsJS, and the architecture is more complicated. With NSS I could follow the implementation and do something with it, but with CSS it was very difficult to follow. - Alain: I am not a coder and I have been able to work with NSS, but I have not been able to work with CSS. - Jeff: What makes CSS better than NSS, then? What are the reasons to switch? - Alain: The reason is that there is nobody maintaining NSS. If we don't implement the notifications spec, it won't be usable. - Jeff: Could we ask them to improve this? To make it easier for newcommers? - Noel: I think they are already working on improving their documentation, but one problem is that their goals are not the same as ours. Their main goal is to support research, so easy entrance for newcomers is not part of their main goals. Even if they improve the documentation, the codebase will still be difficult to understand. Maybe this is something the Solid Team should discuss and ask the community. - Jeff: I'll come up with a draft on how we frame the question towards the community. #### Taking notes - Noel: I think it's fine if we don't write everything that we say, but it's important that each person is responsible for making sure that everything they say is reflected properly in the notes. So you can look over the notes after you speak, or after the meeting, and make sure that everything is fine and add any links as necessary. --- This template is based on the [W3C meeting template](https://github.com/solid/specification/blob/main/meetings/template.md) [Code of conduct](https://github.com/solid/process/blob/main/code-of-conduct.md)