August 2021 Update

The bulk of this month was consumed with a couple of bug fixes and the continued Atlassian migrations, along with a number of vacations. The wiki migration is essentially complete at this point but has been much more trouble than anticipated because of subtle, often undocumented gaps between the Server version and the Cloud version, particularly once content is converted to their newer format. We accelerated converting some content because of a regression they caused almost immediately after we first went live that broke a lot of our content. They fixed the bug but it’s a precarious situation and we need to move faster than expected to convert the content over, but then have to deal with a number of incompatibilities and lost features.

Unexpectedly, the wiki migration was a much bigger challenge than the Jira migration has turned out to be. The functionality there is much closer, and we have completed migration of all projects save for the Member Support service desk features. That work to set up new projects for each member to use for support tickets is ongoing, but should be done by late this week or next week, at which point we can make that final switch and shutdown the old system.

Dealing with access to Jira for filing issues is still a bit of a work in progress until we see what the problems are, and there are some options we may explore to offer additional options for that, but for most of the usual reporters it should be a pretty simple process of requesting access once.

While we hopefully knock out this migration a little sooner than anticipated, work will continue on other aspects of the project infrastructure to modernize things (we’re on CentOS 8, so we have to deal with that before the end of the year as well).

There’s not much to report vis a vis actual development. Patches for the IdP and SP were necessary to fix regressions and work around a Microsoft bug respectively, and the plan is still to release an SP update this fall once OpenSSL 3.0 is final, and probably get IdP V4.2 out before the end of the year, but the latter doesn’t have a lot of urgency as most of the new work is happening outside of core. The SP update will be delivered with packages built in AWS using the new build process but will be available from the same mirrors.

The next major deliverable is probably going to be a plugin for OIDC RP proxy functionality, but there’s a lot of refactoring to do between the other existing OIDC components to complete that work.

Other preliminary work on prototyping for the SP redesign also continues.