GeoServer PSC meeting notes, Nvv 19th 2024

GeoTools / GeoServer PMC meeting - 2024-11-19

Attending

  • Peter Smythe
  • Kevin Smith
  • Andrea Aime
  • Jody Garnett
  • Jukka Rahkkonen

Actions from prior meetings:

Agenda

  • FOSS4G Belem incoming
  • OSGEO slides
  • OGC API Features status update
  • CSP GSIP
  • Modules cleanup
  • Ask for money ala QGIS
  • Chit chat

Actions

  • Jody: GeoTools AGM Page
  • Jody: Copy 2024 sponsorship opportunities, removing CITE testing as a goal (done)
  • Andrea: Ask GitHub about hosting downloads and any size / bandwidth limits (done)
  • Andrea: Send modules cleanup list to the geoserver devel forum (not email) (done)

FOSS4G Belem incoming

Jody and Gabriel are going to represent GeoServer

  • GeoServer workshop, state of presentation, ogcapi-features presentation, GeoServer cloud, rendering overture without local storage, K8S operator for GeoServer
  • Security with Kindness and Compassion
  • GeoTools, JTS and Friends

OSGEO slides

  • GeoTools slide - action item? Jody to make something…
  • GeoServer slide / GeoServer 3 slide
    • sidebar:

OGC API Features status update

Progress with Gabe and Andrea:

Success

  • Pass QA fully!
  • Pass CITE tests, Gabe created github actions to run CITE tests!
    • Found some bugs in the CITE tests themselves and made PRs
    • PRs now run CITE tests! Amazing

  • Andrea working on WMS 1.3, close to pass as well
  • Machinery in place to try out more tests
    • Q: Can we kill the Jenkins jobs for building CITE images?
      Check with Gabe first.
  • Build geoserver.war, stick in docker image, pull TEAM Engine images from docker hub and then run the tests, then report the results

In progress:

  • Proposal to graduate the CQL2 modules in geotools-devel, please vote (implemented the abstract test suite (ATS) against GeoPackage, pretty extensive, thanks OGC)
    • discussion about case insensitive compare and sort / temporal / and so on that not implemented yet
    • Thanks to Paul Mauduit for working on the CQL2 ATS implementation
  • GSIP-230 - OGCAPI Features Extension (draft)
    • Gabe has deadline on this, so please vote when it comes up for review
  • Jody slow to make conformance enable/disable (working on user interface now)
    • Ability to turn off functionality, like sortBy which may change in the future

CSP GSIP

GSIP-227 - Content-Security-Policy Headers

Modules cleanup

See geoserver-devel for unused / unloved/ unsupported modules (often don’t build):

  • 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.

Action:

  • Andrea send modules cleanup list to the geoserver devel forum (not email) (done)

Ask for money ala QGIS

Peter liked the QGIS download + donate reminder:

  • Can we implement the same? Donate via OSGeo or GitHub

  • See https://geoserver.org/sponsor page for Donating via PayPal or GitHub

  • Quick: Add a note to the download for “latest” releases by updating the template

Possibly best coupled with uploading the artifacts to the GitHub tag?

  • to avoid poor experience of waiting on geosever.org and then waiting on SF ads

Will we have issues with uploading lots of large binaries in GitHub? Is there a limit?

  • about releases …
    Each file included in a release must be under 2 GiB. There is no limit on the total size of a release, nor bandwidth usage.
  • Can trial addings some steps to release script alongside SF
  • alternative: repo.osgeo.org - can create a “raw” repository for downloads

OSGeo Budget request:

  • Need a wiki page with sponsorship opportunities and budget request for 2025
    • action: Copy 2024 sponsorship opportunities, removing CITE testing as a goal
  • We should respond before next meeting?
    • Do we wish to use our 2024 budget for anything…-

Chit chat

Crowdfunding

Release update:

  • Peter working on blog post

  • small hiccup with geotools release (strange maven dependency / assembly interaction) thanks for fixing Jody

  • small hiccup with windows installer (credentials updated) thanks for fixing Jaun

Info about OGC Certifications How Our Compliance Program Works - Open Geospatial Consortium

  • OGC Certification Services - OSGeo
  • This would be an excellent use of our 2024 budget (and we have contributions from prior sponsors)
    • Andrea provides a demo (main CITE engine offline, but beta one is working)
  • Keep in mind:
    • Looks like OSGeo offers hosting (a VM with Docker)
      • So we would need some docker images to run on different ports
      • The data folder has the sample data for each test
    • WFS test is destructive (makes changes) and needs a reset to clean state
      • Recommendation: Make a demo request to remove all contents, and then insert the data again
    • WCS 1.0 version negotiation does not work; so needs a cut down war

Hi all,
I just got feedback from Github about hosting releases on Github, considering both our space and bandwidth usage.

My question:

I’m one of the GeoServer project administrators. Currently we are using Github for version control and tag releases, but we are not uploading the binaries there:
GitHub - geoserver/geoserver: Official GeoServer repository

Currently we upload binaries to Sourceforge, which has been hosting our releases for the past 20 years:
GeoServer - Browse /GeoServer at SourceForge.net

We cut a release each month, recent releases have roughly 500MB worth of binaries in them. As you can see from the SF statistics, we have a fair amount of downloads, in excess of 23 thousands per week (some of the downloads are for smaller files, not all of them are 100MB worth).

Another interesting bit is that amongst the various binaries, we also provide a Windows installer (and exe file) and eventually we might get a OSX installer as well.

Now… assuming that we want to migrated to Github for releases, and we just push new releases there (not the full history), would we be in troubles anytime soon, related to binary storage, or bandwidth usage?

And their answer:

Hi Andrea,

Thanks for reaching out!

Release assets on GitHub don’t count toward repository size limits since they exist outside the Git repository. Releases are intended for distributing versions of code in the associated repository, and individual asset files must be under 2GB. There’s no total size limit for a release, and bandwidth isn’t capped or charged.

However, since releases are meant for distributing versions of the code developed in the associated repository, please note that if GitHub identifies releases being used as free cloud storage, the repository or account may be disabled.

Your usage of 500MB per release with high download volumes should be fine. If any potential concerns arise, GitHub would contact you in advance to discuss options before taking action.

You can learn more about releases here. Let us know if you have further questions!

Long story short, we should be fine moving releases to Github.

Cheers
Andrea

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