JourFixe-2022-09-19

Date and place

Monday, 19 September 2022 from 13:00 - 18:20 at VC meeting in BBB.

If you like to participate at the Jour Fixe, please join our BigBlueButton-based Jour Fixe VC!
We recommend to use BBB in Chrome (or Firefox).

1 Appointments

2 Miscellaneous

2.1 Tool for an Open ILIAS Workspace

Discord has been selected as tool for an Open ILIAS Workspace. The ILIAS channel of Discord is here: https://discord.gg/H9v2v2Ar2T. Feel free to join.

2.2 UI Clinic

Our UI/UX/A11y experts Yvonne Seiler and Kristina Auerswald are offering bi-weekly UI clinic consultation hours for UI/UX and accessibility topics. The consultation hours are open for all users that need or are interested in related help for their ILIAS development activities. The UI Clinic consultation hours take place every Tuesday before Jour Fixe from 14h30 to 15h00. If you are interested in discussing an issue, please register here!

2.3 Style Guide for English Language

Our expert for English language, Chris Potter, has created a Style Guide for English Language in ILIAS to help developers when writing English labels and bylines. Major aim is to improve the quality and the consistence of the English language file. We kindly please all developers to have a look at this style guide and follow its recommendations!

In addition, Chris is currently revising the entire ilias_en.lang for ILIAS 8 and corrects and streamline the texts. This already came with a couple of commits in the last weeks (and still will go on).

In case of questions to the style guide or the correct use of English language in ILIAS, please feel free to contact Chris.

2.4 Maintainerships

The following maintainerships will change or are offered for takeover by another developer:

1. User Service: Stefan Meyer would like to hand over maintainership of the component Services/User to an interested developer in the nearer future.

   • Developers willing to take over this maintainership are highly appreciated. Please contact the ILIAS product manager (Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel]) if you are interested in taking over the maintainership.
   • We have already received one expression of interest by a developer to take over the maintainership after the beta phase of ILIAS 8.

2. Object Service: Alexander Killing has removed his implicit maintainership for Services/Object.

   • Developers willing to take over this maintainership are highly appreciated. Please contact the ILIAS product manager (Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel]) if you are interested in taking over the maintainership.
   • We have already received one expression of interest by a developer to take over the maintainership after the beta phase of ILIAS 8.

3. Administration: Alexander Killing and Stefan Meyer (2nd maintainer) would like to hand over maintainership of Services/Administration to an interested developer. Code is in good state and the service ready to be used with PHP 8.

   • Developers willing to take over this maintainership are highly appreciated. Please contact the ILIAS product manager (Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel]) if you are interested in taking over the maintainership.

4. RBAC: Stefan Meyer would like to hand over the maintainership for /Services/AccessControl to an interested developer in the nearer future.

   • Developers willing to take over this maintainership are highly appreciated. Please contact the ILIAS product manager (Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel]) if you are interested in taking over the maintainership.
   • We have already received one expression of interest by a developer to take over the maintainership after the beta phase of ILIAS 8.

5. Tree: Stefan Meyer would like to hand over the maintainership for /Services/Tree to an interested developer in the nearer future.

   • Developers willing to take over this maintainership are highly appreciated. Please contact the ILIAS product manager (Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel]) if you are interested in taking over the maintainership.

6. SOAP & Web Services: Stefan Meyer would like to hand over the maintainership for /Services/WebServices to an interested developer in the nearer future.

   • Developers willing to take over this maintainership are highly appreciated. Please contact the ILIAS product manager (Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel]) if you are interested in taking over the maintainership.
   • In the meantime, an expression of interest for taking over this maintainership has been received. More information will be provided as soon as possible.

3 Release Planning for ILIAS 8 and 9

• Status of testing ILIAS 8
• Impact on timeline for ILIAS 9
• Options for resolving conflicts

4 Maintained Versions

At the time being, we are maintaining ILIAS version 6 and version 7.

4.1 Roadmap

4.2 Mantis Reports

All open issues reported or modified since the last Jour Fixe were screened by the product manager before the Jour Fixe and assigned to the responsible developers if necessary. The following issues were discussed in detail:

1. #27925: learning progress not shown for test when not attempted: We all prefer a clear and consistent rule for displaying the learning progress status of objects (here T&A). The PM will invite to a virtual workshop to discuss possible options within the next weeks and present the workshop's recommendation on the next JF at 17 OCT 2022.
2. #33622: Mail to local roles in learning sequence: change lang-ID to mail#:#mail_roles#: Please replace the mentioned lang ID and then assign the report to mkunkel for finalising the wording in English.
3. #33860: Setup/Settings (Administration): Missing mechanism to change the field type of `settings: value`: We have no objections against changing to varchar(4000). Please adapt as suggested.
4. #:
5. #:

Postponed to next Jour Fixe:

1. …

4.3 Mantis Statistic

Mantis reports[1] set to status 'open' and not been touched by responsible maintainer for more than 21 days (checked this morning) as well as bug reports with priorisation voting:

* New votes: bugs priorised within the last 14 days   ** Old votes: priorised bugs before last JF (older then 14 days)   *** Resolved: Resolved or closed bug reports in the last 14 days

Reports with status 'Fixing according to priorisation' should be fixed before other bugs are tackled. Priorised bugs are very important for one or more institutional members of the ILIAS society. Handling this reports with low priority contradicts the intention of the established bug fixing process.

4.4 Development Issues of Maintained Versions

The following development issues concern one or more maintained versions. Issues related to upcoming versions have to be added in chapter 4.

1. JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe]:

4.5 Open Pull Requests to Discuss

The following pull requests in the ILIAS GitHub repository were marked with 'Jour Fixe' this morning:

1. PR3839 • CI: activate captain hook and fix codestyle before commitook + Windows approved : Michael wants to notify all developers about this change.
2. PR4901 • Development Proposal: Text Handling : We highly appreciate this suggested and ask Richard to complete the proposal for text handling.
3. PR4916 • UI Framework doc: UX Guide for properties and actions on repository objects : We highly appreciate this suggestion and accept it for trunk. In order to create a quick orientation for readers in terms of content, we still ask for the inclusion of a short abstract and a designation of the target group for this text. 
4. PR4952 • Fix for creating repository objects with long titles or descriptions : We highly appreciate this PR and accept it for 8 and trunk.
5. PR4959 • Rule Change for the usage of Standard Forms : We highly appreciate this PR and accept it for trunk.
6. PR5033 • src/Data: Add Enum trait : Facing the changed timeline for ILIAS 9 we have to discuss again the required software for ILIAS 9 and the supported PHP versions. Probably, we do not support PHP 8.0 with ILIAS 9 and therefore do not need this emulation of enum. Decision will be made on the next TB meeting.

Postponed to next JF:

1. PR5027 • New UI-component "Launcher" proposal for JF decision :

4.6 Continuous Integration

• Michael Jansen gave a short overview on CI.
• Richard Klees added an improved language file sorting check/task as an additional GIT hook/CI workflow step: https://github.com/ILIAS-eLearning/ILIAS/pull/4591
• Unit Tests:
  • As of today, there are (executed with PHP 8.0)
    • 8460 unit tests (+21)
    • 20567 assertions (depends on the order of tests being executed / not stably determinable)
    • 12 skipped unit tests
      • 1 x \TagInputTest::testUserCreatedNotAllowed
      • 10 x T&A
      • 1 x \ilServicesPreviewTest::testRendererFactory
    • 1 incomplete unit test
      • \ilSessionTest::testPasswordAssisstanceSession

5 Publishing ILIAS 8

5.1 Software Requirements for ILIAS 8

Required and supported software for ILIAS 8 is as follows:

• ILIAS 8 will support PHP 7.4 and 8.0.
• ILIAS 8 will not support PHP 8.1. Reasons are:
  • It is not possible to support the range of PHP 7.4 - 8.1 in a single release without suppressing E_DEPRECATED errors for 8.1, and we don't want to soften our error reporting policy for future releases of ILIAS.
  • We can't guarantee all our dependencies are compatible with PHP 8.1 until the beta release.
  • Nevertheless, all component maintainers and contributors MUST provide commits with passing unit tests for the PHP 8.1 build.
  • If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the Technical Board.
• Support for PHP 7.3 will be dropped!
• PostgreSQL support is abandoned.
• OpenJDK 11 shall be supported for ilServer.

5.2 Development Issues

1. Abandon Legacy Views in Mediacast : the legacy list and tile views in Mediacasts are abandoned with ILIAS 8. There is no automatic migration to the new views. You need to set a view manually. If you are using different media types in one mediacast you need to create a copy and set appropriate views for each one separately.

   JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe]: Thanks for this additional abandon article. This helps to create more awareness about this important change in the mediacast in ILIAS 8.

5.3 Status of Implementation

• 71 features have been committed to trunk.
• A new section for migrations has been added to the release page, see here
  • All migration steps will be also mentioned on the release page

In  the meantime, all affected developers have been contacted personally and asked for completion.

5.4 Testing ILIAS 8

Today, test week 8 (of 10) has started.

Timetable

• Testing of ILIAS 8.0_beta1 has started at 01 AUG 2022.
• All 4746 test cases have to be executed at least once until 28 OCT 2022. (changed)
• The deadline for retesting and final bugfixing will be set depending on progress in bug fixing. (changed)
• A first stable release of ILIAS 8.0 is targeted for the end of January 2023.(changed)
  • Publishing a stable 8.0 requires that 98% of the test cases are passed successfully.

Status 19 SEP 2022, 12:00

• 1310 Passed (27%)
• 445 Blocked (9%)
• 91 Retest (2%)
• 319 Failed (7%)
• 2623 / 4788 untested (55%)

Current Performance

*   Current performance: number of executed test cases per week since last JF.
** Necessary workload: Number of test cases to be executed per week to reach deadline without delay.

@Maintainers

• Blocked and failed case numbers are still higher than usual.
• Several components require fixes to allow proper testing. Please make sure to treat the respective issues with high priority.
• Some test plugins still require updates and/or an updated information concerning the supported versions. 
  If you develop a test plugin, we already contacted you by email. If not done yet, please update your plugin(s) in order to advance testing. If no updates are required, the test manager would appreciate a short heads-up.

Testers wanted

1. xAPI/cmi5
2. Support in other open areas is appreciated as well. Please contact the test manager (fabian@ilias.de) if you would like to help out.

Changed Definition for Severity 'Block'

We extend the definition for the severity "block" in Mantis (see https://docu.ilias.de/goto_docu_pg_68674_4793.html) to identify 'blocker' easily:

• Current definition: "Es ist nicht möglich, mit ILIAS zu arbeiten oder es gibt eine ernsthafte Bedrohung der IT-Sicherheit. Es gibt keine Möglichkeit, den Fehler zu umgehen."
• New definition: "Es ist nicht möglich, mit ILIAS zu arbeiten oder es gibt eine ernsthafte Bedrohung der IT-Sicherheit oder der Fehler blockiert einen Testcase und macht damit das weitere Testen der Komponente unmöglich. Es gibt keine Möglichkeit, den Fehler zu umgehen."

5.5 Timeline for ILIAS 8

• Feature freeze at 30 APR 2021
• PHP-8-Reviews completed until 28 APR 2022
• Coding completed for refactored components: 11 MAY 2022
• Incorporating results of reviews: 26 MAY 2022 to 13 JUN 2022
• Final check of components by their maintainers on 14 and 15 JUN 2022
• Pre-Testing from 16 JUN 2022 until 22 JUL 2022
• Incorporating of Pre-Test results: 20 JUN 2022 until 28 JUL 2022
• Release 8.0 beta1 and release-8 branch published at 29 JUL 2022
• Begin of testing phase started at 01 AUG 2022
• End of testing phase planned for 28 OCT 2022 
• First stable 8.0 release planned for JAN 2023
  
• Full maintenance for version 8: until 31 DEC 2024
• Security bugfixes only: until 31 DEC 2025

6 Developing ILIAS 9

6.1 Timeline for ILIAS 9

Due to the changed timeline of ILIAS 8 we had to fundamentally change the schedule for ILIAS 9. The aim was to secure sufficient resources for the completion of ILIAS 8 and to take away the time pressure for the programming of ILIAS 9. In short, the release plan for ILIAS 9 has been postponed by one year.

• Feature freeze at May 31, 2022: deadline to suggest new features for this version
• Coding completed: all features implemented and test cases finished until October 27, 2023
• Release 9.0 beta1 and release-9 branch planned for October 30, 2023
• Beginn of testing phase scheduled for October 31, 2023
• End of testing phase planned for Februar 02, 2024
• First stable 9.0 release planned for March 15, 2024
• Full maintenance support for version 9: until December 31, 2025
• Security bug fixes only: until December 31, 2026

6.2 Software Requirements for ILIAS 9

The required and supported software for ILIAS 9 is as follows:

1. PHP:
   • ILIAS 9 will support PHP 8.0 and 8.1.
   • Support for PHP 7.4 will be dropped.
2. PHPUnit: 9.x
3. Composer: Composer 2
4. DBMS:
   • MariaDB: 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 (we recommend to use MariaDB)
   • MySQL:  8.0
5. HTTP:
   • nginx:
     • Supported: 1.12.x  - 1.18.x
     • Recommended: 1.18.x
   • Apache >= 2.4.x
6. JAVA:
   • …
7. NodeJS:
   • Supported: 16 (LTS) + maybe next LTS version (has to be evaluated when released), 17, 18
   • Recommended: 16 (LTS)
8. PDF Generation:
   • wkhtmltopdf
     • Supported/Recommended: 0.12.6
9. Other Software:
   • unzip: 6.0+
   • zip: 3.0+
   • Imagemagick:
     • Supported/Recommended: 6.8, 6.9
   • Ghostscript:
     • Supported/Recommended: 9.51
   • MathJax (optional): Supported 2.7 and >=3.2, Recommended: 2.7

6.3 Development Issues

1. JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe]:

2. JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe]: 

6.4 Suggested Features for 9

1. Abandon RTL-Support : We follow the recommendation of the UI coordinator and CSS maintainer and abandon the current RTL support with ILIAS 9. We invite all users who need RTL support in ILIAS to help implementing a sound RTL support in the future. Please contact the Product Manager if you are interested in contributing (ideas, ressources, funding).

2. Edit target levels of competences in profiles: We still like to have this feature and re-schedule it for ILIAS 9.

3. Streamline Competence Entries on Competence Records-Tab : We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9. Please check with the SIG Portfolio and Competence Management if "Materials" is still needed here (or if this could be abandoned).

4. Streamline Competence Profiles in Courses and Groups : We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9. 

5. Streamline date filter of competences to courses and groups : We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9. We hope that an extension of the UI Filter with a duration input will be available soon to use the new filter implementation for this request.

6. Study Programme: Abandon Dynamic Tree in Manage View : We follow the recommendation of the SP maintainer and abandon the Dynamic Tree in Manage View with ILIAS 9.

7. Show Only Available Points : We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9. 

8. Confirmation Mail to Sharer after Sharing a Portfolio : We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9 - but without the configuration for sending a notification mail. Users who share their portfolio should always be notified about a successful sharing process. In addition, a success message should be shown too (and notify also about the sended confirmation mail).

9. Separation of portfolio creation and creation of a portfolio from a template : We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9.

10. Messages for Specific Bookings : We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9. Please add a byline under the text input to clarify who receives this message (e.g. "You can add a message for the administrative staff."

11. Rearrange Actions in Forum Threads and Reduce Print Actions : We discussed if cannot abandon the print option in general, make "Read all" as a distinct button and change the primary split button to a simple primary button. Idea will be discussed with maintainer. Final suggestion will be presented on an upcoming JF.

12. Using Maven to manage dependencies : We highly appreciate this suggestion to refactor the build process for the .jar file and accept it for ILIAS 9. Stefan will implement this also as a security bug fix for ILIAS 8.

    Postponed to next Jour Fixe

13. Page Editor » Accordion Editing

    • Feature request presented by Killing, Alexander [alex]
    • Requested length of time 15'

14. Improve Search Index with Tika

    • Feature request presented by Meyer, Stefan [smeyer]
    • Requested length of time 15'

15. Submissions and Grades: New filter options “Membership“, “Submitted before“ and “Submitted after“

    • Feature request presented by Glaubitz, Marko [mglaubitz]
    • Requested length of time: 15'

7 Developing ILIAS 10

7.1 Timeline for ILIAS 10

• Feature freeze at April 30, 2023
  
• Coding completed: all features implemented and test cases finished until October 25, 2023
• Release 9.0 beta1 and release-9 branch planned for October 27, 2023
• Beginn of testing phase scheduled for October 30, 2023
• End of testing phase planned for Februar 05, 2024
• First stable 9.0 release planned for March 13, 2024
• Full maintenance support for version 10: until December 31, 2025
• Security bug fixes only: until December 31, 2026

7.2 Suggested Features for 10

1. [[]]

   • Feature request presented by
   • Requested length of time '