Meteor Package Update

[AndyatFocallocal]

Josh (i think) has joined in and kindly offered to try and update our Meteor packages to solve the local host set up issue that's been scaring away most new members who find and join our project.

I'm going to connect him here with our most active team members as he's replied to a cry for help i sent out and i'm not sure if he wants to join our platform or not.

@TLMcNulty @Marvelxy @cw00dw0rd @zofrex are our most active members and you can ask them and myself any questions you have here Josh (i think).

[AndyatFocallocal]

Oh, yes! I should mention that the 'deploy-phm' branch is the most recent. There should be no difference between the packages there and on 'master', but best to work on that branch just in case as i am sure it has the successful recent package updates from @TLMcNulty and i'm only 95% sure that master has them.

[jmarks-joshua]

Hi Andy,

Yes Josh is my real name. I'm very happy joining your community.

A little about me:
Live and work in the UK as a freelance software developer. Been in the industry 7 years + 4 years study. I maintain a relatively small, but fairly complex Meteor app as part of my business. I see you're also using React which is good, because it's the only front end framework I know and have been using it for all of my freelance career.
I've never worked in an open source project before, but have been meaning to get my feet wet for a while.

I am not a Meteor guru by any means, but I know my way around an application and have maintained my project from 2016 (version 1.4) to a release earlier this month (version 2.4).

Can someone give me a little more information on the hesitancy of upgrading Meteor just via a standard meteor upgrade? I understand that there can be issues with package compatibility, but you're not using all that many meteor packages as things stand, so shouldn't take long to make sure they all make sense. Also I saw on one of the links you sent me that there was some discussion of doing this in 2019, but there were issues with mongodb not playing ball with the new version. I can't really see where you're currently hosting your server or your data just yet, but upgrades are fairly simple usually, and in the dev environment I always just reset the database, but it wouldn't be too difficult to keep all your local data if that was required.

Just want to check if I'm missing some of your barriers that I need to consider.

Looking forward to diving in!

[AndyatFocallocal]

Its great that you want to be a part of our hopeful build!

I've not seen others online yet today, but hopefully that'll change soon. As you want to join in fully here's a more detailed Getting Started Guide: https://publichappinessmovement.com/t/topic/1370

We've also just put a basic timeline up here to give an idea about the project: https://publichappinessmovement.com/t/topic/14

[TLMcNulty]

There's no real hesitancy, just a lack of time by capable resources. If you'd like to take a crack and upgrading the major meteor version that'd be super.

[AndyatFocallocal]

Oh, i'm also from London but living in Portugal now :)

[jmarks-joshua]

@TLMcNulty fair enough. Tbh just upping yourself to 1.12.2 will probably solve a lot of the dev environment setup issues. Might be a good stepping stone version to spend longer on a major release update.

I have had a look at a major version upgrade, looks like the main things holding you back are alanning:roles and sylque:accounts-discourse. I think the alanning:roles should be an easy enough migration, main issue is the roles are stored in a different part of the user document which means a database migration. They do provide a migration script though.

sylque:accounts-discourse you might be best off forking it and upgrading it manually (if it's even still needed). Given it's a library with only 2 files, both of which are fairly small it shouldn't be too much work. I don't even think it would actually need any changes made to it, it's just got a package constraint of an old version of meteor accounts.

On a side note my IDE is complaining of eslint errors on every file, is that something I might be able to tidy up as well? I don't want to submit a PR with a change to every file without some sort of warning.

[AndyatFocallocal]

Just tagging @sylque as he should be able to offer some insight into that package constraint.

[AndyatFocallocal]

Also well done identifying a plan of action so quickly 👍

[cw00dw0rd]

Sounds good, who would be in charge with updating it? I would be happy to try it out after as well

[TLMcNulty]

I can take a look at the migration script and see what it'll take to migrate into a new cluster. Probably won't be very difficult, the tables are small and working with our new provider is fairly painless. Thanks for pointing out that specific package needs it done. I'll read up on it.

Re: eslint go nuts, I'd actually like to configure standards for linting in the github checks if possible. Make sure you constrain those changes to one PR though.

[sylque]

I've just discovered an old pull request from TLMcNulty on sylque:accounts-discoursea about the Meteor account package constraint. Sorry I missed this. Is it still up to date? Anyway, feel free to create another PR if needed and I will merge it.

[AndyatFocallocal]

Sorry the platform is down atm everyone. It's a discourse update issue I think, and the app is totally refusing to build again after it

[AndyatFocallocal]

Ok, we're back!

[AndyatFocallocal]

@jmarks-joshua Did you join our platform yet, if so what's your username over there?

@Marvelxy has kindly offered to help guide you around and make sure its a smooth onboarding, i'll connect you both over there.

[AndyatFocallocal]

@TLMcNulty did you see @sylque's question?