JourFixe-2023-03-20

Date and place

Monday, 20 March 2023 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 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!

2.2 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.

2.3 Maintainerships

2.3.1 Maintainerships to be Handed Over

The following maintainerships are offered for takeover by another developer:

Developers willing to take over this maintainership are highly appreciated. Please contact the Technical Board if you are interested in taking over the maintainership.

2.3.2 New Maintainerships

3 Maintained Versions

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

3.1 Roadmap

Lifecycles of maintained versions

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:

Postponed to next Jour Fixe:

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 ILIAS Refinement

Report by Denis Strassner from the [[[Project] ILIAS Refinement]] workshop at last DevConf

3.6 Open Pull Requests to Discuss

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

Postponed to next JF:

3.7 Continuous Integration

4 Publishing ILIAS 8

4.1 Timeline for ILIAS 8

4.2 Software Requirements for ILIAS 8

4.3 Development Issues

1. According to PDF maintainer Vollbach, Guido [gvollbach], the development of wkhtmltopdf has been discontinued at the beginning of this year and security patches will no longer be available. Guido suggests to declare the use of wkhtmltopdf in ILIAS 8 as deprecated and to remove related code with ILIAS 9. He would like to discuss if the related PDF factory code is removed, too - or if we keep it for future projects.

   JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe]: We follow Guido's suggestion and declare wkhtmltopdf and the PDF factory as deprecated. All related code will be removed with ILIAS 9 due to end of maintenance of software. We ask Guido to add a related notice to the release notes of ILIAS 8.

2. JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe]:

4.4 Testing ILIAS 8

Timetable

Status 20 MAR 2023

Current Performance

Other Issues

As of 6 MAR, there are 607 open issues (last JF: 684) in Mantis selecting the following filters:

153 of these issues have the title "Failed test". This implies that 454 (last JF: 480) have not been pushed from TestRail. PM asked maintainers to review these issues.

New Test Cases for ILIAS 9

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.

5.2 Software Requirements for ILIAS 9

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

5.3 Development Issues

1. Learning Sequence: Improve Handling of Learning Progress Settings of Sub-Objects : In a discussion with Nils Arne Brockmann and Henrik Pruiskens we found that it is irritating for users that the "Learning Progress Settings" are displayed even if the settings are not relevant for the progression of the user in the LSO. We thus propose to only show the settings in the table when they are relevant for the progression and display the text "für Fortfahren aktuell nicht maßgeblich" and a similar text for english.

   JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe]: We follow the maintainer's suggestion and accept the proposed change. Information about learning progress setting will only be displayed when relevant for learning sequence.

2. JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe]

5.4 Project 'Removing of Legacy-UIComponents-Service and Table'

Status news: 

Next Bi-Weekly-Meeting: Monday, 27 MAR 2023, 14:30 - 16:00

5.5 Suggested Features for 9

1. Improve Presentation of T&A-Results : We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9. Thanks for pushing the Presentation Table forward!

2. Abandon Emoticons in Repository Chat and OnScreen-Chat: We highly appreciate this suggestion and abandon emoticon support  in Repository Chat and OnScreen-Chat with ILIAS 9.

3. Improve Adopt Content (for Courses and Groups): We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9 with the following changes:

   • The message box on the new screen for adopting the page content should only appear if there is already page content in the target course/group and page content can therefore not be inserted.
   • Tags are not considered because they are user content.
   • If page editor content is adopted as well, the content style is copied too - except the target course/group is a forced content style from an upper category.
   • The Adopt Content button should be moved to the upper tool bar.

4. Page Editor » Code Editing: We still like the suggestion and re-schedule the feature for ILIAS 9. It would be nice if the font used for entering code could already be a font with fixed space. Please add sect. 3.4 and add related information about A11y.

5. Page Editor » Column Layout Part II : We highly appreciate this suggestion and re-schedule the feature for ILIAS 9.

6. Multilingualism for Wikis: We highly appreciate this suggestion and re-schedule the feature for ILIAS 9. Please add related information about A11y in chap. 3.4

7. Improve Manage-Tab in Mediacasts: We still like the feature and re-schedule it for ILIAS 9. But we prefer to use the new Data Table (instead of the Standard Listing Panel as stated in the decision from 2020) for the manage screen. It is sufficient to represent videos as pictures in the table. No need to run them inline. University Bern would highly appreciate to offer funding for extending the Data Table and allow the use of pictures within table cells – if necessary.

8. Fully LOM-conformant Metadata: We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9.

9. Handling of preconditions in standard listing panels : We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9. The final implementation might be a bit different from the proposals above due to possible changes of the way how properties will be displayed in the future within the Standard Listing Panel. There is no need to list the number of preconditions (see suggestion by Matthias).

10. Changing operator of taxonomies from OR to AND: We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule the feature for ILIAS 9.

11. [[]]

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6 Developing ILIAS 10

6.1 Timeline for ILIAS 10

6.2 Suggested Features for 10

No suggestions today to discuss.