Infrastructure

Florian Effenberger wrote:

I'll put this into the generic infra pile - Alex is quite busy with tasks at the moment
Let's make an EasyHack out of that
For Etherpad I remember that several plugins caused great pain (not sure if the listed ones were amongst them), and had to be removed over the course of upgrades
I tend to rather use the wiki for plugins, as otherwise we risk updates break Etherpad badly, and pads relying on plugins are unreadable

Maybe worth discussing on website@, Beluga?

I'm not sure I understand your mention of wiki. After all, MediaWiki plugins can break like any other plugins and this is mainly about offering an awesome idea pad for the design team so they are not dependent on Google.

Surely Etherpad updates are tested first in a staging VM?
I understand that it might be problematic, if Etherpad would release an update that included security fixes together with breaking changes to the plugin hook system.
Yet, are they really such chaotic releasers?

Luckily, it seems they are integrating image support to the main application: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/tree/image-support-hook In that branch we can see commits from one of the Etherpad maintainers, John McLear, who has developed the image plugin.

Given that the official Etherpad blog endorses these specific plugins, I would think they are invested in seeing them work across updates.

I will interview John McLear and ask him about their release policy and our concern with plugin breakage problems in the future, if we go with the enriching plugins mentioned in the blog post.

I want to add that I take 3rd party plugin breakage problems very seriously, having dealt with content management system updates in the past. It is really frustrating to be "captive" of a plugin that prevents you from upgrading to the latest and greatest.

I can also do a local test install of these plugins to see, if they all they play well with the newest Etherpad.
I did go through all the release notes up to 1.4.0 and did not see any mention of breaking hooks: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/releases

We had (1-2 years ago) big issues with plugins, and over time, had to
disable a few of them, otherwise Etherpad wouldn't start

One sample that pops to my mind was the plugin that shows all existing
pads on the front page, it simply refused to start with this plugin
enabled, but there are other samples

It however looks like you have experiences with Etherpad. ;-) Would you
be interested in helping us out with maintaining our setup?

Florian Effenberger wrote:

We had (1-2 years ago) big issues with plugins, and over time, had to
disable a few of them, otherwise Etherpad wouldn't start

One sample that pops to my mind was the plugin that shows all existing
pads on the front page, it simply refused to start with this plugin
enabled, but there are other samples

It however looks like you have experiences with Etherpad. ;-) Would you
be interested in helping us out with maintaining our setup?

I actually have no experience with Etherpad, but I can help for sure :)
Especially with chores like testing updates.

Ok, I got answers from John.

Q: So my question to you is, how likely is it that those plugins I listed are going to break in future releases?

A: Unlikely.

Q: How is your release policy?

A: It tries not to break any existing functionality.

Q: Do you separate security fix releases from plugin compatibility breaking releases?

A: No.

Next I will try out a local installation.

Thanks for chasing that!
I was just hesitant as we had exactly this problem 1-2 years ago - over
time, more and more plugins got broke, so we had to remove them in the
end if we wanted to keep Etherpad upgradable.

I propose you try out the setup locally (we use Etherpad lite, btw, not
just Etherpad :-) and if it works out, give us a poke, then we try to
give you access to our setup so you can join us in maintaining it - your
help here is greatly appreciated! :)

Ok, tried with local install. Btw., I don't know, if the original Etherpad is even maintained anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad#Etherpad_Lite

Installing plugins was even easier than I thought. In the admin view you see the list of plugins and can simply click Install next to those you want.

Based on my test, I'll present a revised proposal:
Rights Mgmt: Etherpad Admin Pads
Footnotes: Use ep_foot_note plugin
Tables: Use the Etherpad Tables plugin
Images: Use the Etherpad images plugin
Comments: Use the Etherpad Comments plugin

I removed references, because it was only about referencing other pads and there was no way to hide the sidebar it used.
I removed export stuff, because the .odt & .pdf export did not save images and the .doc export did not work and crashed Etherpad. If MW & Redmine export are needed some day, they can be easily installed.

When Jan of the design team gets admin rights, like it was already accepted in an IRC discussion a couple of weeks ago, he can install those plugins himself.

Thanks for testing!
We don't offer the admin panel (IIRC), but do it on the console via npm
install :-)

For access to the machine, we need your SSH keys. Can you send them to
hostmaster@documentfoundation.org ?

Beluga: please have a look at my comment in #1208 for login details to etherpad.

Beluga: If you can have a look at #673 and let us know which is the right repo, we could adjust this
As of shutting down Etherpad, please always poke on the #tdf-infra channel first. We do have a set of fixed meetings (team call Monday 1430 UTC, Thursday 1330 UTC; ESC call Thursday 1400 UTC, and sometimes QA and UX calls; fourth Tuesday in a month at 1600 UTC German community call) where Etherpad is needed and should not be shutdown.

Thanks for your work on this!