News / 01 September 2015

iRODS Development Update: August 2015

This month we had excellent attendance and a full agenda for the Technology Working Group. The development team continued to push forward in migrating plugins from the old Hudson system to our new cloud-based Jenkins system as well as putting together our 4.1.5 release.

August TWG

1. 4.1.5 Update - Issues

   • We will release as soon as CI is green
   • Adding support for CentOS 7
   • Engineering preview for Ubuntu 14 on POWER8
   • Fixes for Fuse
   • Clean up memory leaks
   • Better error reporting
   • Fix for runtime error where database statement table was exhausted

2. Update on GenQuery v2

   • Discuss background on why we are pursuing a new GenQuery implementation
   • Introduce the new GenQuery v2 query engine prototype
   • Will support simultaneous queries across multiple databases and types: Graph, NoSQL, and Relational

3. Request for participation in new consortium working groups

   • Mime-types
   • Persistent identifiers
   • Enterprise message bus

4. Discussion of hosting repositories for iRODS packages, externals for 4.2, and CMake

   • RENCI will host repositories for iRODS and related dependencies
   • Properly package and distribute iRODS externals for build
   • Run-In-Place will still need to build Externals if the packages cannot be installed
   • Open request for Mirrors

5. Discussion of a C++14 compliant compiler: Clang vs G++

   • Simplify iRODS development going forward
   • Necessary for the new Rule Engine plugin framework
   • Chosen compiler will be built for all platforms and hosted in the new repositories

6. Focus for 4.2 release

   • Infrastructure - build and configuration
   • Rule Engine plugin framework
   • Architectural performance enhancements

7. Additional topics

   • At the request of Sanger, three issues were reviewed
     • Issue 2833 – Fix is pushed and will be released in 4.1.5.
     • Issue 2676 – Consortium will talk to Sanger off-line about mirroring.
     • Issue 2803 – Sanger will send us the scripts that they used.
   • Tom Langborg brought up performance and the need for a focus on this. Need to reduce the number of trips to the database. Jason affirmed that we will increase performance for iRODS 4.

August Development Activities

iRODS 4.1.5

We have had 16 issues reported against 4.1.4 which we have been fixing in the last month. We will be issuing a release of 4.1.5 as soon as the 4-1-stable branch passes through CI and federation testing.

iRODS 4.2

The two primary activities for 4.2 are currently the refactor of the configuration scripts, moving from a mix of bash, perl and python into a pure python library. We are now using pyodbc to configure the database which simplifies things greatly. This code should be available in the master branch soon.

The other major activity is the creation of proper apt and yum repositories. These repositories will be used to house the iRODS packages, the externalized plugins as well as all of the dependencies for build and installation. This will allow for a much more smooth installation and upgrade experience as well as allow the Consortium to more easily transition away from the legacy build system.

Plugin Testing

We still continue to migrate our external plugins to the new Jenkins system. HPSS and GSI are next on the list for migration. We should have an additional release of these plugins after 4.1.5 has shipped.

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Jason Coposky