GeoServer/GeoTools PMC Meeting at 18:30 CET / 10:30 PDT tomorrow

GeoServer GeoServer Developer
,
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Reminder that the next PMC meeting is scheduled for tomorrow, March 11, at 18:30 CET.
We’re currently out-of-sync with Daylight Savings between Europe and NA, so this will be at 10:30 AM Pacific time.

Cheers,
Torben

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GeoTools / GeoServer PMC meeting - 2025-03-11

Attending

  • Torben Barsballe
  • Jukka Rahkonen
  • Peter Smythe
  • Gabriel Roldan
  • Andrea Aime
  • Jody Garnett

Actions from prior meetings:

  • Gabe: Send for 2.27.x-cloud, 2.26.x-cloud integration branches to discourse
    I’ll wait a couple weeks until sanitizing the branches in gscloud to have clean patches to contribute upstream

  • All: Help requested handling CVE Disclosure updates, volunteer on geoserver-security!

  • Jody: Motion to direct prior funds generated for CITE certification to direct towards Andrea, Peter, Gabe, and those who contributed as appropriate.

  • Peter: Add notes to developers guide on how to make the CITE certification work repeatable

  • Andrea: Clean up CITE build server jobs that are not in use please (done)

Agenda

  • Outstanding items for the 2.27.0 release
  • Build Server Cert Updates
  • Return of mkdocs
  • List of community module maintainers
  • CITE certification
  • Data directory GSIP-231
  • Security CVE round-up

Actions

  • Jody/Torben: Test geoserver-builds discourse email with Jenkins build notifications
  • Peter: Will remove unloved community modules (pom.xml, docs, packaging)
  • Gabe & Jody: Delay the 2.27.0 release (send new date to developer forum)
  • Jody will ask developers / community to test night builds for community data dir loader.
  • Jody: Meeting invite to geoserver-secruity list for a meeting next week at this same time

Outstanding items for the 2.27.0 release

Action:

  • Gabe & Jody: Delay the 2.27.0 release (send new date to developer forum)

Build Server Cert Updates

Update from Torben…

  • Did not get a notification from discourse
  • Andrea or Jody was not able to find anything useful in logs
  • Not going follow up, …

RedShift monitoring ticket https://discourse.osgeo.org/t/no-expiration-notice-emails/113346

  • wait for a response to that

Torben turned on auto cert renewal again.

Does discourse build email work?

  • Test with Jenkins, and then consider if we keep it
  • Jody and Torben can follow up over time
  • geoserver-main and geoserver-main-docs now also send email to geoserver-builds@discourse.osgeo.org
    • (re)discovered that target email is hardcoded per job (this is necessary so that our different projects can send to different lists, but makes bulk changes difficult)
    • Jody: Add allow for “gtbuildergh@gmail.com” to GeoServer-Builds discourse

Return of mkdocs

Jody would like to pick this up again in Q2.

  • New build that runs the conversions until we’re done and happy.
  • There is also a markdown output format for sphinx
    (loses inline examples and so on but is an option)

Q: Is there interest?

  • Yes
  • Okay then Jody will make a plan and report back another time

List of community module maintainers

See discourse: Who are the community module maintainers?

todo:

  • Adding name ends up with private email support
    • Change from “maintainer” to “contact”…
    • Change to “developer forum” …
  • Non active or abandoned work:
    • List GSR is a good example of this …
  • Double down that this is a DEVELOPMENT activity
    • Please provide code
    • Please provide funding
    • Documentation / testing is welcome but not as important for moving RnD forward

General revamp of community modules to dress up as an “development pending” activity

  • RnD
  • Or modules that are being retired (like ArcSDE, etc…)
    • See developer list for list of modules

Here is the list:

  • app-schema/webservice-test: run only with custom profiles (oddly, both “webservice" and "app-schema” do). It does not even start to build, depends on the gone gt-webservice-test module.
  • gwc-distributed: containing just a Spring context and some dependencies, enables the Hazelcast distributed in memory tile cache. Anyone using it?
  • imagemap, enables the HTML image map output format. I guess nobody today uses HTML image maps in cartography, but if you do, please let me know.
  • jdbc-metrics seems to collect statistics about queries in JDBCFeatureReader. On one side, it seems like a useful tool to track time actually spent talking to the database, on the other, it has no documentation has has seen to action for the past 7 years. Anyone using it, or that would be interested in writing a bit of documentation for it?
  • monitor-hibernate provides database storage for the monitoring subsystem. Unmaintained, based on the dead Google code genericdao framework, and afflicted by using primary keys in a log table (insertions become slower and slower), it probably deserves some final rest, a suitable replacement would be a rewrite, not a few small fixes.
  • pgraster despite the name it’s an easy to use UI on top of the no longer existing gt-imagemosaicjdbc. This one already has a removal PR.
  • saml is gone already, but its assembly descriptor survived and should also be removed.
  • wps-sextante is based on the Sextante java libraries… which I cannot find any more. The version it depends onto has been released around 2012, the module received its last direct commit in 2015 (all others are mass refactors), has no documentation, Sextante for Java seems nowhere to be found…
  • xslt is a WFS output format generator based on XSLT that was demoted to community in May 2023. Looks like nobody complained, I’d complete the job.

Regarding extensions, the following look like good candidates for demotion to community:

  • h2 store, based on the old and unmaintained H2 v1.x. While we cannot get rid of it completely, as some modules keep on depending on it (e.g. the NetCDF store family), I’d make its availability as a vector store harder to get.

We should really clean out community modules ahead of GeoServer 3:

  • Idea: Could do a test by withholding jars and see what people use / request
  • Very popular (like COG) but folks are not forthcoming with funding to complete
    (similar in scope to OGC API - Features so it is not something PSC can fund)

Action:

  • Peter: Will remove unloved community modules (pom.xml, docs, packaging)
    • not complicated, just annoying (and we often end up with zombie documentation)
    • would be kind to do a separate commit for each module removal, allowing revert, and Jira ticket for release notes
    • Example of removal of gwc-distributed

CITE certification

Peter: 11 tests (awesome!) sessions line up for release of 2.27.0

  • Including GeoTIFF and GeoPackage (nice)
    • We run the test 4 times, to validate a few different configurations and validate each one
    • What do we submit? Only one…
  • PR: Document the CITE Certification process
    • Gabe has reviewed, and has some feedback (move environmental variables to top of files)

Data directory loader GSIP-231 Catalog data directory

Gabe: What is needed for this to be voted on and accepted?

  • Needs testing: Found an issue yesterday with factor lookup deadlock (CRS Factory, DataStore Finder). That would be a separate issue to report and explore …
  • Did a workaround static init to do a CRS.decode( … )

Aside:

  • The current loader uses a system property defining the parallel loader and the name has periods in the name (not env var friendly for cloud setups)
  • Gabe wishes to include this as an integration fix current PR

Discussion:

  • Upgrading section needs to document the new 2.27.0, link to docs on environmental variable

Proposal:

  • https://github.com/geoserver/geoserver/wiki/GSIP-231
    • Example is nice, want more feedback and testing
    • Jody will ask developers / community to test night builds for community data dir loader.
      • Test with extensions (as they may trigger a lookup that results in a deadlock etc…)
      • expectation: PSC members please try this out and vote

Security CVE round-up

Out of time this meeting:

  • jody: Meeting invite to geoserver-secruity list for a meeting next week at this same time
  • aside: volunteers for geoserver-security should email directly please :slight_smile: