Impact Framework Updates 11/07/24

[Joseph Cook]

Hi IFers!

It's been a busy fortnight at IF HQ!

Please find a summary below - you can also check out some more detail in our Github Issue.

Announcements

We released IF v0.5.0! Thie release included some important new features and also some substantial changes to the repository structure and even renamed some commands, so make sure you are up to date to get the best out of IF. We haven't shipped any breaking changes - your old pipelines and plugins should still work the same as always, but it's a good idea to upgrade to keep up to date with the latest best practices and latest features.

Notice we've also deprecated the use of "node-level" config across our builtins and docs. We still support plugins that use node-level config but we don't recommend it, as we'd like to stop supporting it in the future,

I am also planning to add some new items to the discussion board this week, so keep your eyes peeled if you are interested in themes such as interoperability and life cycle assessments!

We will also skip the monthly call at the end of July as many people are on vacation. Ill still post the async updates though.

What we've been working on

We closed out the last epic and started a new one!

The final changes for the last epic included shipping if-check (thanks @manushak ) and integrating it into our CI/CD allowing us to check a large set of positive and negative test case manifests when we merge into our release branch as part of our automated testing (nice work @narekhovhannisyan ). 

We also made some necessary upgrades to our existing builtins, including adding some more robust validation that handles zeros more gracefully and avoids unnecessary panics. At the end of the epic we also did some substantial cleanup that included restructuring the IF repository so it's easier to work with as we add more features.

We also made a solid start on the new "i/o" epic, including deprecating our current CSV export features in favour of a dedicated script. This is part of a general move towards exhaust scripts that act independently of if-run - this is a simpler and greener flow as it means you can reformat outputs without having to re-execute manifests. @narekhovhannisyan is also busy refactoring IF so that the execution of a manifest is separated into distinct phases that can be run independently, making IF more modular and greener.

We have also added more community plugins to the Explorer - the plugin ecosystem is growing!

New features

The if-env and if-check tools are now fully shipped and come bundled into IF. You can use `if-check` to verify that a given manifes was executed correctly. if-env will help you to create development environments or to install the packages required to execute a given manifest.

We also renamed our main run command from ie to if-run. This is to make the commands consistent in that they are all prefixed with "if-".

Ways to Contribute

It's been fantastic to see community members snapping up issues from our board - we've had several things picked off the backlog by open source heroes this fortnight!

We have some open issues on the board still - look out for the `good-first-issue` label for good introductory tasks to take on. There are also some more substantial tasks if you are more experienced or feeling brave!

Thanks everyone,

Joseph

--

*****************

Joseph Cook

Product Owner: Impact Framework, 

Green Software Foundation

*****************