Re: Inrupt Pod Server

Hi Jeff,

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 10:20 AM Jeff Zucker <dubzed@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not able to attend this week's call but would like to add my thoughts
> for the discussion of the Inrupt pod server.  I support the idea of
> switching away from NSS on solid.community at the same time as inrupt.net
> and making it clear that unless someone picks it up, NSS is no longer
> maintained.
>

Great! :)


>
> In advance of major server changes, it would be really helpful if someone
> with knowledge of the server development could inform app and library
> developers about the expected time-frame of the changes and exact
> switch-over time once known.
>
It would also help immensely if there could be documentation where we can
> read about the expected changes before they occur.  These docs should be
> oriented to app and library developers, not just server implementers and
> maintainers.  For example, I am thrilled by the pluggable backends (great
> work!), but in terms of getting my libraries and apps functioning, I care
> much more about how the REST API and login and authorization flow will
> behave and how file-naming will work.
>
  Those were the things that changed between NSS 4.x and 5.x and caused
> apps to break at multiple points.  Some advance warning would go a long way
> to easing the transition.
>



Yes. Good news on that front: there should be no API changes and no on-disk
file format changes. So this transition should hopefully be smoother than
the previous one, in that respect.


I am specifically concerned about the issues filed on NSS 5.x regarding
> regressions in GET, PUT, and POST with respect to file extensions and
> content-types.  I'm unsure which of the changes suggested in those issues
> will be implemented in IPS and I can't really begin to plan without knowing
> that. Frankly, it's been a discouraging few months since NSS 5 was
> introduced and I hope for a smoother transition to IPS.
>

I know, that was an unfortunate confluence of two situations really, first
in NSS we made a decision to clean up the ResourceMapper which in hindsight
maybe was better left as it was, because it surfaced a lot of problems and
the mitigation of those took up a lot of our time, and after that we still
didn't get to a point where the ResourceMapper was working properly, or
where we understood its code well enough to safely fix the remaining
issues. Second, the development of IPS took longer than was originally
planned, which meant that we were in this limbo state for longer than would
have been necessary in our original plan.

I know that your team was hit especially hard by this, especially also
since we couldn't merge Alain's PR, which I personally also feel really
sorry for.

But the good news is we'll soon be out of the woods and getting very close
now to setting up a testing server against which we can start to test our
applications. Also, it should now already be possible to run the IPS code
on localhost, using the instructions from
https://github.com/inrupt/pod-server#running-on-localhost-nss-compat-mode.
There are likely to be some bugs to be uncovered at the beginning, but
we'll commit to fixing each of them asap as soon as they are reported.

In particular, I'll also test how IPS deals with default content types,
since I know that was one of the major things you ran into lately with NSS.

Let me know if you have any more questions!


Cheers,
Michiel.

-- 
> Jeff Zucker
>