Ironwood is coming!

[Ned Batchelder]

Hey everyone,

The next release of the Open edX software is "Ironwood."  We are getting ready to start the release process.  The first step is creating the open-release/ironwood.master branches in the appropriate repos.  I plan to do this on Friday, January 18th.

Anything merged by that date will be part of Ironwood; anything merged after that date will have to wait for the next release.

A week or two after the branches are created, we will have a beta for everyone to test.  Then after a few weeks of community testing, Ironwood will be officially released.

If you have any questions or concerns, respond to this thread, or send an email to os...@edx.org.

Thanks,

--Ned.

[Robert Gérin-Lajoie]

Hi Ned, will you tag the mobile apps (iOS and Android) with Ironwood?

Robert

[Mahyar Damavand]

Hi Ned,

by this time which hawthorn release is the latest stable version,

Currently we're on hawthorn.2 and I want to know if it is safe to migrate to hawthorn.master on our production environment.

Thanks a lot,

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[Ned Batchelder]

Robert,

I believe we will be tagging them for Ironwood, yes.

--Ned.

--

[Ned Batchelder]

Mahyar,

You can install hawthorn.master.  It has only a few commits beyond hawthorn.2.

--Ned.

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[Ned Batchelder]

Robert,

I asked Marco Morales about this, and he said, "I'm not convinced it is all that helpful to pin or tag these specifically? We publicize named platform release dates, mobile release version dates (with github tags). I'd rather people stay closer to master for mobile (which they generally do) rather than tracking all breaking changes across the two."

What do you think of that?

--Ned.

[Pierre Mailhot]

I can answer that one.

We recently wanted to try the latest mobile releases with Hawthorn. Unfortunately it was not possible because one of the mobile API used by the latest mobile release was changed post Hawthorn. We hope it will be included in Ironwood.

See https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/commit/026d574576b8433817973d0a69a81b223471fa7a#diff-ad6006d4311d06b65d1bc3d6636ad9c9 for details.

Therefore, it is not possible for organizations using named releases to follow master or the latest releases for the mobile apps. Unless they cherry pick changes that are not in hawthorn.master for example.

Maybe all we need is a page stating which mobile releases are working with which named releases?

Is this more clear?

[Lupus Furyo]

In case of mobile clients, generally, it is always better to stick to master. This does not concern Open edX only.

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[Ned Batchelder]

Lupus, can you explain why that is?  Did you see Pierre's experience that the latest mobile app didn't work with Hawthorn?

Thanks,

--Ned.

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[Lupus Furyo]

Hi Ned,

I was replying from my gmail inbox, I did not see Pierre's last reply regarding usability. My remark was of general type, especially concerning Sec of an App. Mobile apps get updated too often due to known concerns. Perhaps, this is why Marco does not like tagging Open edX App with named.releases. Anyways, please ignore my remark regarding this matter. Pierre has already elaborated his question and suggestion thoroughly.

Best, L.

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[J'aime Ohm]

I agree with Lupus and Ned that it is best to stay on latest for mobile. Changes to the API are generally minor or nonexistent between versions and are easy to cherrypick. I'm running master against a Ficus and a Ginkgo instance and will be running against a Hawthorne instance when it's ready for me in the next couple of months. My situation is similar to Pierre's, except I'm running master against even older backend(s). 

I agree with Pierre, the cherrypicking is annoying. I've found the changes are minor though, for avoiding a change. To avoid having people cherrypick, the mobile team might consider keeping small API changes behind feature flags for a platform release or two.

Some reasons to stay on master include...

- older versions of an app often don't run as-is, even if the version of Xcode, OS, Swift, and Android Studio are named, because of changes by Apple that affect this and are uncontrollable

- it's more natural to contribute PRs if you're testing and running against master

- like Lupus says, security updates

- other maintenance updates that may be time sensitive, like support for new devices or new operating systems or new requirements by the stores

[Ned Batchelder]

J'aime, thanks for your perspective.  I'm still trying to understand: does the master of the mobile apps work against Hawthorn?  You say they work against Ginkgo, so how could they be broken against Hawthorn?  You mentioned cherry-picking, is that picking changes to the mobile app, or to the server?

--Ned.

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[Ned Batchelder]

Oh, and one other thing:  Why not tag the apps, and then let people decide for themselves if they want to use a tagged open-edx release, or if they want to use master?

--Ned.

[Pierre Mailhot]

Ned, I tried compiling master through Android Studio for the mobile app.

It compiles, it installs but it won't show me the courses on the dashboard. It is complaining of an unknown error.

I checked out release/2.16.4 which is still using the old enrollment API and everything works without a problem.

At this point, I cannot say master works with Hawthorn.

[Jill Vogel]

Hi Ned!

Why not tag the apps, and then let people decide for themselves if they want to use a tagged open-edx release, or if they want to use master?

+1 to this!

J'aime is totally correct, that usually, the API changes between versions are minimal, and so you can run master mobile apps against the latest named release with no issue.  And we like to stick to master for the apps, because then our users get all the latest greatest features.

But with Hawthorn and the latest master iOS app, we had a few issues that weren't well documented:

• Authentication for HTML/Problem content now requires Django OAuth Toolkit Application integration, cf comment on edx-app-ios#1222 There's a link there to the Slack discussion.
  Probably too late to go in the Hawthorn release notes, and it's possible the change wasn't in iOS master when Hawthorn was released?
  
• The above authentication change also required configuration#4937 for us, since we have a load-balancer that sends basic auth to the backends, and DOT treats basic auth headers differently from the old DOP auth did.
• Mobile API v1 not in Hawthorn (only v0.5).  edx-app-ios#1222 also alludes to this, but since the iOS app is gradually converting from v0.5 to v1 endpoints, we chose to close this PR, taking into account all the client changes that might be required to support both versions was more complex than we had time to manage.
  Pierre, this might be the issue you're seeing?

Having a named release tag on the iOS app would have helped with both of these issues!

The authentication change would still require a config change (and we still would have needed configuration#4937) but a warning in the named Release Notes would have at least alerted us to the problem.

Cheers,

--

Jill

@OpenCraft

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[Ned Batchelder]

Thanks everyone, this is very helpful.

--Ned.

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[Pierre Mailhot]

Jill, this is *exactly* what we encountered.