Hi Steven / all, To be clear, given Giulio's input on Slack and the responses on this thread, *I am* *not planning on changing anything related to PDF certs* *aside from hiding the option to use them on edX's own sites*. From an edx.org course author standpoint, PDF certificates will be deprecated in that it will no longer be possible to run a course on edx.org that uses PDF certificates, but all of the other code to generate/use them will remain intact (and if Stanford can contribute its improvements back to the main codebase, all the better!).
Other Open instances, as Dave said, should still be able to run with a message queue other than Redis, so the change that we are making locally will have no major consequences for other Open instances. Stanford and others will absolutely be able to continue using PDF certs. Thanks everyone for your input–it's been very helpful in clarifying how we should go about this change. Best, Sandy On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 5:20 PM stv stnfrd <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Sandy, > > > > I am reaching out to get a sense of how extensively PDF certificates > > are used by other Open edX instances > > As disccussed in Slack, Stanford uses these extensively. > > > > and how much of a burden it would be for those instances to move to > > web certificates. > > Too much. We have no plans to do so. > Besides the effort involved, we prefer the UX and product workflow of PDF > certs. > > > > edX.org no longer supports PDF certificates > > Stanford has maintained our fork of the codebase since late 2014 [1]. > Before we forked, we were the active maintainers of the core repository; > we used to have commit access and our developers have authored 78/136 of > the commits to-date [6]. > > Since forking, we have continued to improve the codebase, including the > introduction of a YAML-based templating system which significantly > increases speed and ease of certificate design and development [2]. > > > > as we move away from using RabbitMQ, we are also moving away from > > supporting PDF certs because they are integrated directly with > > RabbitMQ > > This isn't quite right; certs integrate via XQueue, not RabbitMQ [3]. > > > > they are not managed by Celery like other asynchronous tasks. > > There's some truth here. The certificate "agent" [3] is a > supervisor-managed service that polls an XQueue endpoint and > pops/processes jobs from there. We've previously expressed interest in > decoupling certs/xqueue for varying reasons, namely that we have a few > deployments that otherwise don't need XQueue and it would be nice to > remove that dependency from the infrastructure. > > I did a proof-of-concept of this waaay back at the 2015 OpenEdX > Conference Hackathon, but never had the time/motivation to make it > production-ready [4][5]. We'd be interested in finding a path forward > in revisiting this. That said, unless edX has plans to deprecate XQueue > (do you?), this seems to be a less pressing concern. > > > > We are looking at the possibility of deprecating PDF certificates as > > part of the next Open edX release and possibly even deleting the code > > entirely. > > We would not like to see this happen and hope to find a path forward for > preserving this functionality. We'd like to explore options for assuming > stewardship of this codebase, so let us know how we can help. > > Thanks for reaching out and hope to discuss further, > Steven at Stanford > > [1] https://github.com/Stanford-Online/openedx-certificates > [2] > https://github.com/Stanford-Online/openedx-certificates/blob/master/cert-data.yml > [3] > https://github.com/Stanford-Online/openedx-certificates/blob/master/certificate_agent.py#L26-L32 > [4] https://github.com/stvstnfrd/edx-certificates/pull/1 > [5] https://github.com/stvstnfrd/edx-platform/pull/12 > [6] https://github.com/edx/edx-certificates/commits/master > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the > Google Groups "General Open edX discussion" group. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/edx-code/b8005fa2-e5e6-4053-8709-791b34fbf8ff%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/edx-code/b8005fa2-e5e6-4053-8709-791b34fbf8ff%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General Open edX discussion" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/edx-code/CAORH0%2BAqeaGHC47ax3G-5OkAJ3k3L1JdKAjzgOh%2Bh2MsQuU83w%40mail.gmail.com.
