# 19 August 2021

In Attendance
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- Present: Marc, Alex, Dulip, Sonya, Ronald, Alec, Antti-Jussi, Clinton
- Regrets: Pierre

Quick Updates
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### What have you been working on lately?
- **Marc** - Vacations.
- **Alex** - Porting Scopus/Crossref Plugin (cited by) and Shariff (social network sharing) plugin for OPS. SciELO/PKP partnership.
- **Dulip** - DEV: Long-time-archiving, lensGalleyBits plugins , Ops: ithenticate, crossref plugins
- **Sonya** - working on some harvesting issues between our journals and preservation indexing services; planning upgrade to 3.3; cleaning up supplementary files (from 2018 upgrade)
- This stems from the uploading of not-for-public-consumption files as supplementary files in OJS 2.x.
- Could document in upgrades?
- Should we have a sysadmin or devops channel? Alec will ping Michael to see if PKP hosting would find that useful or participate.
- **Clinton** - push to upgrade to OJS 3.2 (including ULS plugin support); infrastructure work to support OJS 3.3 (PHP 7.3 on RHEL)
- **AJ** - Back from vacation, answering all Journal.fi support tickets gathered during summer. Started to work on a few OPS issues. Will start preparing our installation for 3.3 upgrade.
- **Ronald** - Fixes for DNB-Plugin for OJS 3.2, setup of docker testing environment, adding new features to slider plugin, preparing infrastructure to support OJS 3.3
- **Alec**
- New conventions for 3.4: https://github.com/pkp/pkp-docs/issues/812
- OJS/OMP/OPS 3.3.0-8 to be released in a few weeks

Old Business
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- July minutes are here: https://github.com/pkp/technical-committee/blob/main/meeting-minutes/2021-07-15.md
- Membership conversations - Sonya sent emails to Adivisory Committe seeking feedback in mid-July and followed up in late July. No response so just double checking that they were received before moving forward with recruitment!
- Final FINAL actions from survey - final report needs to be distributed - Sonya and Alec meeting with PKP's new comms manager next week. Can consult with Marc and Alex on any drafts of communication before it goes out
- Release and testing planning: For discussion - Nate's email: are there questions or comments we can bring to a follow up meeting with Nate (eg September meeting?)

**Main points:**
1. We schedule major work to expand our integration tests in 3.5. We would identify gaps in our existing tests and write tests to cover a more diverse set of workflows, user roles, published material, plugin configurations, etc. We would also try to acquire historical test data from our community and use this to test more diverse upgrade environments.

2. We try to increase adoption of automated testing in our community. We could write documentation and invest in tooling to help service providers write and run automated tests against their platforms. The key here would be automation: the more we can automate the testing process in a production environment, the more frequently the tests will be run. For us to tackle this problem, we need the community to run tests regularly (eg - quarterly) against pre-release software -- not just when they get around to upgrading.

3. We introduce a LTS version that will only receive fixes for critical bugs and security issues. I don't think this necessarily solves the pain of upgrades, but providing a 3-5 year committent to one version will at least give service providers some peace of mind that they won't be forced to upgrade on a timetable they can't keep.

Questions:
- naming - what becomes the LTS version? Support for clear labelling, and stable version - how do we determine what become the new LTS branch? What tools are needed? Calendar could help with this (eg ensure that version is designated for 3-5 years to ensure stability)
- What's required to move these initatives forward? Develop a proposal for the directors.
- 3.5 timeline is not slated yet
- what resources and committment from PKP (and stakeholders) is needed to move in these directions? Has been a focus for a while for the Dev team (preparatory: DAO rewrites facilitating unit testing)
- Plugins: need to flesh out implications (testing; maintenance; pain points; release schedule and updating)
- Publishing plugin compatibility more clearly (e.g. PKP website)
- Effort in rewriting plugins against new version
- Investment in automated testing
- Would an LTS release detract from pressure to keep e.g. plugins up to date?
- What would happen if an LTS is adopted but someone wants to back-port a new feature?
- Back-ports can of course be undertaken by anyone, but PKP may or not accept (merge)
- Should PKP accept back-ports officially or no? Should this be the burden assumed with using an LTS?
- Perspective on community testing: Would like to participate but investment of time is considerable. Not sure tooling will help. Database and files are huge.
- Could we capture aspects of big installations in representative data? (e.g. multijournal)
- Since some aspects (e.g. performance) depend on large datasets, it may be necessary to explicitly test in this case (and see about tooling to facilitate)
- Hosting does have a set of queries to anonymize data. Files can be truncated to 0 bytes or stubbed out with dummy documents.
- PKP's current CI test set:
- Metrics:
- ~20 users
- ~15 submissions (~2 published)
- 1 journal
- 2 languages
- All generated from scratch using Cypress / Travis
- Limitation: currently takes ~40 minutes; won't scale.
- Improvement of API will help (adoption for pre-seeding)
- Separation of integration testing will help
- Usage of pre-generated dumps will help (already required for automated upgrade testing)

Question of the Month
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- Testing working group - Conversation with Nate (and many conversations earlier) identified need for consistent, thorough, coordinated approach to testing. Is this something the Technical Committee could assist with through a new working group or series of working groups? How could it work?
- Interested folks: Alec, Sonya, Ronald, Dulip, Marc, Antti-Jussi
- How can the group work together and what is the best target?
- Sonya will find a time for us to meet.
- Other potential first tasks?
- CI pipelines and tools
- Upgrade testing
- Unit testing

Other topics
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- Planning sprints - how has this worked in the past? Who's been responsible for planning? how did we pick hosts and locations? Is there interest in returing to this work in the next year or so?
- Location
- Often driven by volunteers (often from the TC) to host
- Was supposed to be a Finland sprint last year, but suspended for reasons
- Would like to return to this planning for 2022 :)
- Planning
- Kevin would take a major role in this; TC can maybe pick up some of the work
- Suggest coming back to this next month, hopefully with confirmation from James.
- About CI/CD tooling - What tools is PKP dev using right now and plans to improve it (if any)?
- Travis (current toolset)
- Gitlab CI/CD
- Github Actions

Next Meeting
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- Nate to be invited for a continuation of discussion on release planning / LTS

Third Thursday of the month: 8am Pacific
Sept 16, 2021