Meeting 27 08 2025

Date/Time

27/08/2025 at 17.00 CEST

Agenda

• Website changes review (Jody)
• Open PRs
• Next version: 4.4.9 / 4.2.14
• Issues needing attention
• Proposals

Attending: Antonio, Jody, Jose, Dave, Olivia, Guillaume De Oliveira (Camptocamp)

Actions

• Jose: need another pass of the landing page by someone else
• Guillaume: write proposal for a Docker image variant with the Datahub plugin
• Olivia: reach out to Juan regarding Dependabot PRs
• Jose: come back to Ian regarding validation report improvement PR
• Jose: come back to Ian regarding user selection API PR
• Olivia: look for reviewer for GN4 harvester PR
• Olivia: look for reviewer for Database harvester improvement
• Olivia: look for support at C2C regarding memory leak report
• Olivia: dispatch Udata harvester issue in C2C

Website Change review

• Landing page is much more engaging and up to date
• Need for a another pass on the landing page by someone else; Jose volunteers
• Feedback on specific sections, such as description of ISO-19119 etc…

Comments:

• Q: Should we mention Elasticsearch?
• Outside of your PR, however, I think GitHub (and discourse) are the official place for discussions???
  I'm not sure - perhaps we should highlight here and put the most important first?
• I think (not sure) that the compose config also runs es.

Open PRs

Dependabot is highlighting many dependencies updates:

• Juan was following them; Olivia will check with him whether he is still planning on looking at them
• See https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+dependabot

PRs lacking reviews:

• Validation improvement: https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/pull/8985
  • Can be backported to 4.2.x if the contributors have the budget and are willing; the backport should include clear migrations to handle the API change (validation report JSON structure)
• Changing User Selection List API, yay or nay: https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/issues/8844
  • Using @Deprecated is now a way to mark a part of the GN4 API as "do not port this to GN5"; not much else will be done to deprecated APIs and it's fine like that
  • This means that the change originally proposed by Ian can be approved
• https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/pull/7579 GeoNetwork 4 cannot Harvest GeoNetwork 4
  • Implement a new harvester for GN4
  • Refactor share most of the code between GN3 and GN4 harvesters
  • Has conflicts, and needs a review
  • Olivia will look for another reviewer at C2C
• Fix labels customized per context in the full metadata view: https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/pull/9000
• Database harvester improvement: support table names https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/pull/8930
  • Olivia will look for another reviewer at C2C

Next Version: 4.4.9 / 4.2.14

Upcoming release planning:

• 4.2.x branch should be phased out in the near future
• 4.4 exists because it runs on Java 11; this means that support for Java 8 should be phased out alongside 4.2.x
• Communication should be done to the community about EOL, migrating to 4.4.x stable etc..
  • This is a point release, so not much changes, mostly Java 11 etc …
  • When to migrate? When you have completed QA and are happy that it works for you :)
  • Aim for a six month transition period, … however as folks transition less and less will be backported

Java 8 phase out:

• Can no longer get maintained dependencies for Java 8, it is time to move on (for some time now)
• 4.2.x can enter maintenance, for emergency fixes and so on
  • no updating releases schedule etc…
  • release "as needed" (say for emergency fix, or if someone gets budget/request)

Issues needing attention

Two memory leaks:

• https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/issues/8717
  • No decision
• https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/issues/8853
  • Olivia will submit it to people at C2C for a deeper look
• https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/issues/8928
  • question/missing feature in the Udata harvester; Olivia will dispatch this to someone at C2C

Proposals

• Introduction of a :<version>-datahub variant for the official geonetwork docker image (Guillaume)
  • A proposal will be written on https://github.com/geonetwork/docker-geonetwork
  • Hopefully Juan can look at it and give feedback
  • There's currently no automated process for publishing images; this proposal will first simply add a separate Dockerfile and a set of instructions here https://github.com/geonetwork/docker-geonetwork/blob/main/4.4.8/README.md
  • If budget permits, we could envision introducing an automated process (Github Workflow) and also publishing to the Github repository => a discussion should be held about this specifically (first assess the need for this and then agree on an implementation)
  • Effort led by C2C
• Creating a permalink to a private record: https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/issues/8637 (Sébastien)
  • No decision

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Thank you all!