Developers Meeting on Weds, July 18, 2018

 

Agenda

Quick Reminders

Tim Donohue will be out of the office most of next week (July 23-26). Returning to the office on Friday, July 27.

Next week's meeting on Weds, July 25 to concentrate on DSpace and Docker (Led by Terrence W Brady and Pascal-Nicolas Becker )

Friendly reminders of upcoming meetings, discussions etc

Discussion Topics

If you have a topic you'd like to have added to the agenda, please just add it.

  1. (Ongoing Topic) DSpace 7 Status Updates for this week.  No major updates this week, Sprint #2 is ongoing

    1. DSpace 7 Working Group (2016-2023) is where the work is taking place
    2. DSpace 7 Dev Status spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18brPF7cZy_UKyj97Ta44UJg5Z8OwJGi7PLoPJVz-g3g/edit#gid=0

  2. (Ongoing Topic) DSpace 6.x Status Updates for this week

    1. Master ports from 6.3. A number of PRs merged into 6.3 release have not yet been ported to `master` branch.  These PRs are closed but still have the "port to master" label. 
      1. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X-Zk56gz-wg6p7JaiuBzzUquqOvwwx_-o_ZDDvGPSQU/edit?usp=sharing 
      2. As we're working through this list, we should remove the 'port to master' label from the dspace-6.x PR and if possible, edit the JIRA comment to remove the "63_PORT_TO_MASTER" text.
    2. 6.4 will surely happen at some point, but no definitive plan or schedule at this time.  Please continue to help move forward / merge PRs into the dspace-6.x branch, and we can continue to monitor when a 6.4 release makes sense.
  3. Brainstorms for "Plumbing" changes (from last week's meeting)
    1. Bulk Operations Support Enhancements (from Mark H. Wood)
      1. Better support for bulk operations (in database layer), so that business logic doesn't need to know so much about the database layer. Specifically, perhaps a way to pass a callback into the database layer, to be applied iteratively to the results of a query.
      2. Then, the database layer can handle batching, transaction boundaries, and other things that it should know about, and the business logic won't have to deal with them.
      3. This is the result of thinking about a recent -tech posting from a site with half a million objects that needed checksum processing.
      4. (This is almost an extension of the tabled topic below regarding DSpace Database Access, but a bit more specific in trying to simplify/improve upon how bulk operations are handled)
    2. Curation System Needs (from Terrence W Brady )
  4. Tickets, Pull Requests or Email threads/discussions requiring more attention? (Please feel free to add any you wish to discuss under this topic)
  5. FUTURE TOPIC: How to encourage / credit folks who do Code Reviews? (Tim Donohue)
    1. We have a lot of open PRs.  As we know, the process for reviewing is very ad-hoc, sometimes encounters delays.  If we can find ways to encourage/empower folks (even non-Committers if they know Java / Angular well) to do code reviews & be credited publicly...maybe we can speed up this process?
    2. Other brainstorms welcome!

Tabled Topics

These topics are ones we've touched on in the past and likely need to revisit (with other interested parties). If a topic below is of interest to you, say something and we'll promote it to an agenda topic!

  1. Management of database connections for DSpace going forward (7.0 and beyond). What behavior is ideal? Also see notes at DSpace Database Access
    1. In DSpace 5, each "Context" established a new DB connection. Context then committed or aborted the connection after it was done (based on results of that request).  Context could also be shared between methods if a single transaction needed to perform actions across multiple methods.
    2. In DSpace 6, Hibernate manages the DB connection pool.  Each thread grabs a Connection from the pool. This means two Context objects could use the same Connection (if they are in the same thread). In other words, code can no longer assume each new Context() is treated as a new database transaction.
      1. Should we be making use of SessionFactory.openSession() for READ-ONLY Contexts (or any change of Context state) to ensure we are creating a new Connection (and not simply modifying the state of an existing one)?  Currently we always use SessionFactory.getCurrentSession() in HibernateDBConnection, which doesn't guarantee a new connection: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/blob/dspace-6_x/dspace-api/src/main/java/org/dspace/core/HibernateDBConnection.java


Ticket Summaries

  1. Help us test / code review! These are tickets needing code review/testing and flagged for a future release (ordered by release & priority)


  2. Newly created tickets this week:


  3. Old, unresolved tickets with activity this week:


  4. Tickets resolved this week:


  5. Tickets requiring review. This is the JIRA Backlog of "Received" tickets: 


Meeting Notes

Meeting Transcript