JourFixe-2022-11-14

Date and place

Monday, 14 November 2022 from 13:00 – … 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 Changed Jour Fixe Date : 12 → 19 DEC 22

Due to an important invitation to the Federal Ministry of Education in Berlin, Matthias cannot chair the Jour Fixe on 12 December. Therefore, the Jour Fixe will be postponed by one week to 19 December.

2.2 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.

2.3 PR4896 can effect exisiting System Styles

The Jour Fixe decided on Feb 21st to include the new learning progress icons also for the releases 6 and 7 (see comment 0031804: Status column of learning Progress relies merely on color). Since the new learning progress icons are different from the SCORM icons, the PR New Learning Progress Icons for Release 7 created a new folder "learning_progess" in the images folder for the LP icons.

This affects all existing system styles for releases 6 and 7. If custom LP icons are defined in a system style, they are not taken into account because the order "learning_progress" does not exist in the system style. In this case ILIAS uses the new LP icons in templates/default/images/learning_progress. To be able to use the custom icons, the folder images/learning_progress must be created in the existing system style and the icons must then be moved to the folder.

2.4 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!

2.5 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.

2.6 Maintainerships

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

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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, two expressions of interest for taking over this maintainership has been received. The Technical Board has invited both developers to present their plans in a common meeting. More information will be available soon.

3 Maintained Versions

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

3.1 Roadmap

Lifecycles of maintained versions

• ILIAS 6 : due to the delay of ILIAS 8 the end of maintenance of ILIAS 6 is expected for March 2023. At this time, ILIAS 8 will hopefully be available as a stable release.
  • Note: Only the most important fixes will be ported to Release 6. In general, it is recommended to update to version 7 as soon as possible.
• ILIAS 7 : end of maintenance of ILIAS 7 is expected for April 2024. At this time, ILIAS 9 will hopefully be available as a stable release. 

3.2 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. #32227: LTI Consumer object does not respect the Tab Guideline for embedded content: As already requested in a former JF, we would like to have a "primary button" with label "Show Content" for the tab content of the LTI consumer object. A label "Start" is less precise than the requested "Show Content". Thanks for fixing in 7, 8 and trunk. 
2. #34641: Failed test: Datei mit nicht auf Whitelist stehender Endung herunterladen: We prefer solution (b) and would like to send the correct application/octet-stream header for .sec files. Please adopt the related test case and tackle this specific Firefox behaviour.
3. #35628: Failed test: Prüfungsansicht zeigt Footer: We prefer to keep the footer in the exam view (as already existing in 6 and 7) as it contains important links for users (see comment by Wolfgang for example). In case someone wants to hide the footer to prevent users from clicking on one of the links, the SEB plugin or a customised skin for ILIAS would be a reasonable solution to get this behaviour. But we do not want to implement an additional switch in the settings to show/hide the footer in the exam view. This contradicts our efforts to ease the handling of the T&A. Please change the testcase according to the preffered behaviour.
4. #:

Postponed to next Jour Fixe:

1. …

3.3 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.

3.4 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]:

3.5 Open Pull Requests to Discuss

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

1. PR3990 • Introduced new update parameter for plugged page content : Alexander notified the JF about the introduction of a third parameter $move_operation with ILIAS 8 as a reasonable solution for the plugin interface. We highly appreciate this suggestion and accept the PR for 8 and trunk.  For extended functionality of the page content plugin interface, a workshop would be strongly recommended.
2. PR5194 • CSS: Maintainance Model Change : We highly appreciate this suggestion and accept the PR for trunk. @Amstutz : please let us know if this change of procedure is also effective for 8 and below.
3. PR5206 • Add quality assurance review to md : @kergomard notified us about efforts of the TB to introduce quality measurements for the ILIAS code. Stephan pleases all developers to read the suggestions and to give feedback until the next Jour Fixe.

Postponed to next JF:

1. PR • :

3.6 Continuous Integration

Postponed to next JF when Michael joins us again.

4 Publishing ILIAS 8

4.1 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
• Run all test cases once planned for 11 NOV 2022 (changed)
• 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

4.2 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.

4.3 Development Issues

1. ...

   JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe]: …

4.4 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.

4.5 Testing ILIAS 8

Timetable

• Testing of ILIAS 8.0_beta1 has started at 01 AUG 2022.
• All test cases had to be executed at least once until 11 NOV 2022.
• The deadline for retesting and final bugfixing will be set depending on progress in bug fixing.
• A first stable release of ILIAS 8.0 is targeted for the end of January 2023.
  • Publishing a stable 8.0 requires that 98% of the test cases are passed successfully.

Status 14 NOV 2022

• 3396 Passed = 73% (+8%)
• 379 Blocked = 8% (-1%)
• 455 Retest = 10% (+3%)
• 401 Failed = 9% (=)
• 49 / 4680 untested = 1% (-9%)

Current Performance

• 100% passed: 26 Components (+8)
• Test Runs with all Cases executed at least once: 74/81 (+13)
• Test Runs with more than 10 open Test Cases: 2 (-7)
• Test Runs with more than 10 Cases failed: 9 (+1)
• Test Runs with more than 10 Cases blocked: 9 (=)

Test Runs with open cases

• Booking Tool (2)
• Cron Service (6)
• Login, Auth & Registration (7)
• LTI (14)
• Setup (2)
• Survey (4)
• Test & Assessment (13)

5 Developing ILIAS 9

5.1 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 April 30, 2023: new 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

5.2 Software Requirements for ILIAS 9

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

1. PHP:
   • ILIAS 9 will support PHP 8.1 and 8.2.
   • Support for PHP 7.4 and 8.0 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

5.3 Development Issues

1. …

   JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe]:

5.4 Suggested Features for 9

1. File-Object: Show number of downloads : Thanks for updating the request and giving an answer to the question from the JF. We highly appreciate this suggestion and accept the feature request for ILIAS 9.

2. Abandon Test Setting Digitally Sign Test Submissions and Plugin Slot to sign Tests : We highly appreciate this suggestion and abandon the plugin slot and feature as suggested by Denis with ILIAS 9.

3. Add Open Submission option in Participant View in list of Submissions and Grades : We highly appreciate this suggestion and accept the FR for ILIAS 9.

4. Assignments with Individual Deadlines : We highly appreciate this suggestion but request a change for presenting the notification that an individual timeline has to be requested first. The current place beneath "Working Instructions" confuses several users. We prefer to have a distinct place where this message is displayed. Please update the mockups accordingly and present the request again at the next JF.

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6 Developing ILIAS 10

6.1 Timeline for ILIAS 10

• Feature freeze at April 30, 2024
  
• Coding completed: all features implemented and test cases finished until October 25, 2024
• Release 10.0 beta1 and release-10 branch planned for October 28, 2024
• Beginn of testing phase scheduled for October 30, 2024
• End of testing phase planned for Februar 05, 2025
• First stable 10.0 release planned for March 13, 2025
• Full maintenance support for version 10: until December 31, 2026
• Security bug fixes only: until December 31, 2027

6.2 Suggested Features for 10

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