PSC Meeting 2022-02-11

Participants

• Anna Petrasova
• Huidae Cho
• Markus Neteler
• Martin Landa
• Michael Barton
• Moritz Lennert
• Vaclav Petras
• Vero Andreo

Agenda

The topics proposed were:

• Budget / Sponsoring: Add goals and diff contrib types to Opencollective?
• FOSS4G 2022: Presentations, Workshops, who plans to attend, longer code sprint there?
• RFC that are in draft mode, esp the python one (​https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/RFC)
• GSoC
• DOI: contributors per release?
• OGC - OSGeo Code Sprint
• Set a date for student grants call (so we plan ahead, set goals in opencollective and promote properly)
• Upcoming Releases

Minutes

• Planned budget for 2022:
  • Already submitted to OSGeo: ​https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_GIS_Budget_2022
• Sponsoring:
  • Vero commented on the idea to add other kind of contributions to ​Open collective (for example, regular contributions) and maybe if contributors are companies, have a plan to add their logos to the website as it's done in conferences or in the OSGeo website.
  • Moritz suggested to search for legal advice as probably if we offer a counterpart, we need to do contracts and for companies that wouldn't go as donation but as marketing, hence no tax reduction. The donation button will remain anyway, so companies could choose how to contribute.
  • Vero will ask Michael Smith from the OSGeo board how that would be handled.
  • Michael suggested that GRASS could evaluate the possibility to have some sort of legal entity.
• FOSS4G 2022:
  • Presentations:
    • We will submit a "State of GRASS GIS" talk as usual. We'll share a doc to put that up together - Volunteers?. Markus, Martin and Moritz are planning to attend so potentially they could present. The presentation should show off GRASS 8.2.
    • Linda and Caitlin will also submit something of theirs.
  • Workshops:
    • An intro to GRASS for beginners with all the new GUI stuff
    • A general GRASS workshop with Jupyter lab and python (this could go together with the beginner's one or not)
    • One about remote sensing processing and analysis in GRASS (Vero might take the lead here, others are mostly welcome to join)
    • Markus and mundialis will probably submit an actinia workshop (there's a new ​actinia-STAC plugin) and potentially one about ​Geoserver GRASS raster datastore
  • We mentioned the possibility of an extended GRASS code sprint as we did in Como 2015, but it will mostly depend on who will be attending, so this idea was left in stand-by for now.
• Other conferences:
  • Michael commented that there's also the ​International Environmental Modelling and Software Society happening in Brussels. Sounds like a good fit for GRASS applications too.
• Bugs related to Windows:
  • Broken addon installation: The standalone installer was fixed by Martin and the link in the website was fixed accordingly. The problem was that during packaging, something went wrong and instead of getting 8.0.0, the installer got the dev version. The problem was originally reported in this ​thread in the mailing list.
    • Update: https://grass.osgeo.org/grass80/binary/mswindows/native/WinGRASS-8.0.0-2-Setup.exe has been fixed
  • Modules not working in Windows: See ​#2013. Martin will check.
  • wxlocale error upon starting: See ​#2101. Martin will check if this bug affects him or other users. It's unclear who is affected (Windows version, locales, etc.)
• Backporting:
  • To avoid that future releases have problems, it would be better to let new features stay in main for a while so they get tested better and, in addition, release more frequently to avoid waiting forever to get the new features out.
  • Adopting feature freezing for releases would prevent these last minute new features backport as it is already defined in RFC 4: Release Procedure
  • We should add more tests in GitHub actions to avoid bugs like the compilation bug shipped with 8.0.0, though recreating a no-network env within GitHub might be tricky (if possible). We may need to find some easy sandboxing software/container/solution to be able implement this.
• Google Summer of Code 2022:
  • Anna created the ​wiki page and called for ideas and mentors. She also sent a reminder/invitation to grass-dev.
  • This year GSoC will also admit non-students as long as this is their first contribution to open source software. So, there's potentially a larger population that could apply.
  • Parallelization will be again part of the ideas as other modules may take advantage of running in parallel. Huidae agreed to mentor this idea.
  • Anna also suggested the cmake compilation as a potential project.
• DOI/Citation - which and how many contributors should be cited?:
  • Markus proposed to order by the top n contributors from the last 12 months counting backwards from the release date (a sort of moving windows).
  • We discussed which criteria to use for the ordering and opted for number of lines changed over number of commits.
  • Automation using GitHub api to be studied (Vaclav?).
  • Markus found a command line call, but it lists contributors by number of commits: curl -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" https://api.github.com/repos/OSGeo/grass/contributors
  • GitHub API docs ​here
• RFC about ​Python language:
  • There's a formula there to get the minimum supported python version, but there were no comments on it, hence no voting.
  • It was not clear how would that work for addons as we support addons for/during major versions, but Python version is set to change with grass minor versions. Vaclav suggested that addons should inherit the python version that is currently supported in GRASS minor version and added some clarifications to the RFC. Please review and comment so we can vote on it.
  • Shall we already change Python version ​here?
• Releases:
  • Markus will prepare 8.0.1 RC1 this weekend to provide a quick fix for the compilation bug shipped with 8.0.0.
    • Done: ​https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/releases/tag/8.0.1RC1
  • ctypes error bugfix for Alpine has be bumped to the 8.0.2 milestone.