IF project updates 20/06/2024

[Joseph Cook]

Hi IFers

Here are your Thursday updates from the Impact Framework!

Announcements

Reminder - we have launched the IF Explorer, where you can explore the universe of IF plugins and add your own!

Reminder - Now that we have migrated our entire standard library of plugins over to IF builtins, we have deprecated the if-plugins repository. Your pipelines using those plugins will still work for now, but we will not be actively maintaining them and the repository will be archived soon. You can achieve the same functionality using our IF builtins.

What are we working on?

We've been overhauling our error handling protocols this week, which will make it easier to debug IF runs. We've also improved the developer experience by moving our error handling code into a new repository called `if-core` which you can install as a dependency in your plugins. This means you can integrate into the IF loggers and error handlers simply by importing them into your plugin code!

Manushak also finished working on the new `if-env` feature which enables you to quickly bootstrap a manifest development environment or create an execution environment to run a  specific manifest in a single command.

Meanwhile I have been further refining the tickets for our next epic (you are still welcome to participate in the discussion - check the board here). You can catch up on the latest dicsussions, including:

- separating out the execution into three distinct phases, making IF execution more green, more reproducible and more auditable

- updating how we handle parameter metadata, including unit definitions.

- migrating exhaust functions to scripts so we can keep IF itself feature minimal

- simplifying how we configure plugins in manifest files

Ways to contribute

We are grateful for some substantial community contributions over the past few weeks.

This includes users who have raised bug reports, contributed fixes and added new information to our docs website.

Now we have the IF Explorer website, you can contribute by building and submitting plugins and helping to grow the IF plugin universe! 

We are always grateful for updates and fixes to our documentation website.

If you want to contribute code,we've added several new open issues to our board that you can jump into. There are some bug fixes that would make great first issues, such as

- this one

- this one

some great introductory feature issues, such as

- adding emojis to if-diff output

- enriching the error messages emitted by the CLI

There are some more in-depth open issues available too:

browse open issues


That's it for now, see you all online!

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Joseph Cook

Product Owner: Impact Framework, 

Green Software Foundation

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