Meetings 2014 03 04

2014-03-04

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Present: Brian May, Russell Sim, Kieran Spear

NeCTAR is in the process of redeveloping their identity solution using Karaage. Due to NeCTAR not being a HPC service provider, significant changes need to be made to the user portal.

Concerns were expressed at the rate of development of Karaage, making it hard to keep up. This is mostly due to backwards incompatible changes that are being introduced while trying to reorganise the code/templates into a more logical structure.

This is confounded by the Django development process of copying source files from Karaage and making local modifications. We need to work towards a future Karaage where large scale re-factoring of internal API's either isn't required, or doesn't effect Karaage deployments as much.

Some of the changes that are being made locally should be integrated into Karaage but this is currently going to be delayed because of the existing divergences of the 2 code bases.

To improve this situation we have identified 2 plausible changes

1. Defined hooks that make it possible to integrate site specific changes that are not suitable for integration into Karaage.
2. A best effort to provide backwards compatible interfaces to give other sites a chance to upgrade to new API's.

It was also noted that the Karaage tests are insufficient, and there are many places that errors introduced by re-factoring Karaage will not be noticed by the automatic test suite.