NetBox maintainers meeting minutes, 11 Jan 2024

[jeffgdotorg]

NetBox maintainers meeting minutes, 11 Jan 2024

4.0 milestones (Jeremy)

• Done: Dropped support for Python 3.8 & 3.9, added 3.12
• Done: Replaced Bleach
• WIP: Replace graphene-django library with Strawberry (Arthur)
• WIP: Tabler for web UI (Jeremy)

Downgrading gunicorn? (NetBox bug) (Jeremy)

• Upstream bug is benoit/gunicorn#3038
• If we downgrade gunicorn, we risk losing explicit support for Python 3.11
• Decision: Not downgrading gunicorn.
• Discussion: If we find that gunicorn is becoming less well maintained, should we consider moving to uWSGI or another alternative?

Prefix / IP hierarchy stuff (Dan Sheppard)

• Classifying as a 4.0-maybe any work to address prefix / IP hierarchy buglets. We want to keep a tight focus in that release on housekeeping and infrastructure investments. 📌

Future of reports (Jeremy)

• Discussion: We’re considering merging reports into scripts and eliminating reports as a separate model entity.
• Decision: No opposition -> tagging this change for 4.0. There’s work left to do on fleshing out the particulars.
• ↳ Arthur raises: We had previously talked about making scripts a proper entity in the model (#14438). Currently we model report modules and script modules in the DB, but not the reports or scripts themselves. This gets back to the targeting of event rules.
• ↳ Jeremy: Probably worth bringing this into scope for 4.0.
• Related: Pagination for output of reports and scripts is tagged for 4.0.

Updating translations (Jeremy)

• Requests for new translations are tracked as GH issues. Proposed fixes to existing translations are not – we’re handling that flow directly in Transifex, and there’s now a separate button in the project’s new issue flow that sends you over there. NetBox Labs is covering the cost of machine translation.
• ↳ The one exception to the no-GH-issue-for-translation-fixes policy is if there’s a string that’s not getting translated. This hasn’t happened yet.
• When joining a NetBox translation project on Transifex, there’s an approval step that currently goes through Jeremy. Notifications for these requests seem lacking, so please be patient while we work out the kinks.
• There’s still process work that we need to figure out concerning how translations fit into the release process.
• ↳ Abhi raises: Is there a way to do this for plugins?
• ↳ Discussion: Great question. Unknown for now, this is a good area for interested people to explore.

Import change to plugins (Arthur)

• Heads up: In 4.0 we have dropped backwards compatibility for the extras.plugins mechanism. This change breaks pretty much all plugins, so we need a push pre-4.0 to have all plugin authors update their code.

Door-hanger items

• There’s something of a back-backlog for 4.0 that is under consideration and may end up being in if we find ourselves with spare capacity.
• The window is closing for plugin authors to register opposition to #12325 (removing the Django admin UI).

[jcollie]

Thanks for posting this! As someone that relies heavily on NetBox at work, but doesn't have time to follow developer discussions I appreciate summaries of ongoing development work.