Steering Circle Meeting Minutes, 2021-12-14

General Updates

Team leaders are requested to update their plone.org team pages so we
have good data when we migrate the site to Plone 6

Update on conference videos: Rikupekka has 2 tweets scheduled per day,
the ones tweeted have just been published. But at this point, we should
publish all the videos and be done with it. Continue to schedule the tweets.
Also, we plan to put the conference videos playlist on the plone.org homepage.

Team updates

Marketing - Rikupekka

We had a plone.org sprint, it was amazing. Lots of progress both content and technical, thanks to everyone.
Next sprint: Jan 15th. Discussed doing light content work during holidays, for anyone who can.
Thanks to Paul and Kim for publishing the videos.
WPD is coming, we'll work on that soon.
We have a store for Plone gear, Norbert is doing a great job. Working on
improving delivery options for Europeans.

Membership - Victor

Getting things underway, and started considering applications.

AI - Fred

At the last meeting at the end of November, just 3 team members attended.
The team is investigating the current Jenkins setup, only 1 person knows everything about it (Gil Forcada).
Thinking about replacing with Github actions eventually, but not easy, as Jenkins has some community-contributed enhancements which are great.
So need to discuss and plan, and this has started. Will
publish info and questions on community.plone.org.

Documentation - Kim P.

Still getting up to speed. Got input from Steve Piercy. Would like to move towards the vision she gave at the conference, unifying docs and training, but this will take lots of work...

Framework - Alessandro

Added 2 new members. Wants to move the team towards doing more remote work rather than just meetings every 2 weeks.
They have a PLIP mess to clean up.
Discussing moving the team to focus just on core, make it support any front end, not concerned with Volto, Classic, etc.
Thinking about having separate packages. All this of course is driven primarily by the developers, not the team.
There are people in the community complaining about the multitude of packages, and thinking of merging various things. Alessandro says we must be very careful about this, it would be good to have fewer packages but need to maintain separation of front and back end. At least we don't want to add new packages. But merging just to have everything in one bucket is not a good idea.
Nathan suggests we need an overall strategy - how do we want to manage the packages? For ease of building, separating the front and back ends, etc. there are tradeoffs to these choices.

## Guillotina - Ramon

Moving to Python 3.10. Improving the transactional system, it scales even better. Fixing things.
Training and talk at the conference got good feedback.
No blockers, they are small and move fast.

i18n - Mikel

(Via e-mail) Not much new going on.

Installers - Jens

Work is happening on Docker images. Don't yet have "official" images, that will require feature freeze. Still tinkering.
There is also the cookiecutter-makefile-driven build, in the Blue Dynamics repository. It is in place on the new plone.org website, good playground. Work is proceeding.

PloneEDU - Alexander

The team is coming back from the dead... Idea is to have some user-focused groups or teams. Universities, governments, institutions are prime candidates.
Alexander is thinking to schedule quarterly remote discussions in
various time zones.

Release - Eric, Maurits

Maurits is pumping out releases. Eric is trying to set up meetings to coordinate with the teams. Third and hopefully last alpha release coming up soon. Then on to betas.

Security - Maurits

They are looking into a couple of reports.
Nothing lighting hair on fire. They still need more people on the team. Michael removed log4j from the Zope dependencies so we're good there.
If anyone uses logstash that is also vulnerable. collective.documentviewer is also probably impacted (it uses openofffice server). Quaive is probably safe. Discussed how to alert the broader community who may have integrated Solr/Elasticsearch to the problem.
If we want to email Announce list would need to specify exact versions of add-ons affected. But this is not about Plone itself, and the Announce list should be limited to the core Plone package/distribution. So we shouldn't send an email to that list. But good idea to put a post on the community site and a news item on plone.org reminding people that anything that depends on a number of community addons could be impacted and you should inspect your stack.
If someone who knows more about it could start a community post, that would be great to have.

Training - Philip

Nothing much new. Some changes to the repo and website. Updating descriptions on YouTube videos. Asked but none of the trainers provided chapter markers.

Zope - Michael

Had a sprint. Getting ready to release a Zope which supports Python 2.10 - this week or next week. Consider when this should be incorporated into Plone 6.
Problem regarding C code: Have more than a handful of packages raising deprecation warnings due to C code API changes.

Volto - Victor

Volto 14 is done. Waiting for feedback from companies using it, if all goes well will release tomorrow.
Lots of changes in this release, happy with the outcome. The development of this release has been somewhat hidden but now going back in the open.
There are 11 breaking changes but they are easy to fix. They are not far from parity with Classic, just missing content rules.
Fred suggests we need more communication to get everyone on the same page. It has been very hard being remote with just the one taste of an in-person sprint in Sorrento. Not just the Volto team, but all teams need to communicate what help they need.
We need a product strategy that is clear to all developers. This used to be in PLIPS but don't have that anymore. Who is going to put Slate in Volto core? The Volto team? They are tapped out.
Erico mentions that outside a small group of people it's unknown what numbered versions of Volto will be in Plone 6 - need this to be clearer. Communication hasn't gone broadly outside the Volto team.
There is Roadmap in the Volto repo, but we need something else.
At this point, after 2 years remote no one knows where everything is for Plone 6. Big problem.

Conference - T. Kim

New team to lead conference work. Oct 12-14, training and sprints afterwards. It will be in person!! Joel is booking venues in Namur.
This is all new, but T. Kim says everyone in the conference Slack channel will automatically be on the new team.

Closing

  • Export/Import - Philp: It is going strong

  • Erico sums up the meeting: Everyone likes the idea of a project board for Plone 6. Need a volunteer to run that, he will nudge some people.

  • Requests Maurits ping the Docker team when making a release so they are ready.