Developer Area/Developer Meetings/78

Agenda for the 78th Mahara developer meeting on Wednesday, 4 March 2020, 7:30 UTC

We will meet using Meet.Catalyst (a Catalyst staff member will initiate the call).

Our #mahara-dev channel on Freenode IRC will be our backup or in case there are problems with the web conferencing tool and we'll need to chat to resolve it. If you don't have an IRC client, you can join us using your web browser.

• Chair: Guillaume
• Minute taker: Rebecca

Agenda

1. Items from the last meeting
• Catalyst looking at possibilities of posting audio recordings of meetings online
• Peter testing of trigger patches
• Guillaume: Guillaume to submit documentation for 3rd party plugins for Mahara.org.
2. Mahara 20.04 progress now that we are in feature freeze
3. Next meeting and chair
4. Any other business

Minutes

Attendees

• Guillaume Nerzic, independent (HSBC) contributor of plugins to Mahara (meeting chair)
• Rebecca Blundell, Catalyst IT, Wellington (minute taker)
• Kristina Hoeppner, Catalyst IT, Wellington, New Zealand
• Robert Lyon, Catalyst IT, Wellington, New Zealand
• Antoine, guest, joined part-way through the meeting to listen. Welcome Antoine :)
• Apologies from Ghada El-Zoghbi, Lisa Seeto, Peter Spicer

Items from last meeting

1. Catalyst looking at possibilities of posting audio recordings of meetings online
   * Recordings are being made in Audacity at the moment. It has the limitation that a headset can't be used while a recording is being made.
   * We need to figure out the best place to store the recordings. Examples of recent recording sizes are 30-40mb compressed in ogg format, so we estimate up to 50mb per meeting.
   * The current plan is to keep recordings indefinitely.
   * We could create a wiki page with Terms and Conditions that people can read before joining the meeting which would explain the recording and retention policy and also that if people wish to participate without being recorded, they can do so in the written chat.
   * Those present agreed that we are happy for this meeting's recording to be made available online.
   Action: Find an online storage option. Draw up T&Cs. Link the recordings and T&Cs to the agenda/minutes page for that meeting. (Kristina)
2. Peter testing of trigger patches
   As Peter is not present, we will save this for the next meeting
3. Guillaume to submit documentation for 3rd party plugins for Mahara.org - still in progress

Agenda

Mahara 20.04 progress

Kristina gave a brief update on progress.

• As we are now officially in feature freeze, there will be no new functionality.
• The majority of the new features mentioned in the last meeting last meeting's minutes and in the Roadmap are either already in the codebase or in code review. We are finalising what will be included in the release.
  • One notable exception to this is the submissions feature, which turned out to be a big job in terms of code review as it has implications to core functionality.
    In his patch, Alex introduced data tables, a javascript plug-in which makes HTML tables very customisable. It allows filtering, searching and pagination. We need to look at this more closely and consider making it a core feature instead of a part of the submissions plugin, and look at what implications that would have for Mahara core. Implementing the patch would involve database testing because of the large amount of data involved. Because of the large amount of work involved, this is being moved to 20.10

• The next step in the release process is the design and language string freeze. That will hopefully be by the end of March, with a release candidate in the second half of April.

Other Business

Becoming an approved (+2) developer

• The process of becoming an approved developer is that the developer submits an application via a wiki page, which is sent to the other approved developers. At the following developer meeting, other developers can ask questions and a majority vote is taken on whether to approve the person or not.
• Lisa Seeto is going through the approval process soon.

Security Release for 19.10

• This week's security release is for all supported versions of Mahara. It's recommended people install the latest release as soon as possible.
• This minor point release also included patches for IE11 bugs. We will be moving away from supporting IE11 in 20.04.

Mahara Mobile

Mahara mobile is currently being re-factored in React Native. We are hoping to release the new version in April at a similar time to 20.04. At that stage we can retire the Cordova app. The majority of the Android refactoring has been completed and testing is now starting on iOS.

Next meeting and chair

Wednesday 29 April 2020, 730 UTC Chair: Kristina Hoeppner Mintues: Robert Lyon