Roadmap 2024 #

(Version 1.0, last modified 2024-03-22)

This document provides an overview of the technical roadmap of the Software Heritage initiative for the year 2024.

License identification #

Design a data model for license information #

Priority: medium
Tags: Licence detection, SWH Sec

Description:

Integrate license information to the Software Heritage Data Model, covering all the use cases and levels of license detection

Includes work:

Review state of the art
Define or identify an ontology for license information - must take into account the ability to track license changes over time (including a project changing license without actually changing each files)
Design and implement the model

KPIs:

Updated data model deployed in production

Collect license information from external platforms (as extrinsic metadata)#

Priority: high
Tags: Licence detection

Description:

Collect extrinsic metadata about license from platforms when available (GitHub, package managers..)

Includes work:

Identify the platforms that provide license information
Update related loaders to collect the license data

KPIs:

Number of platforms that provide license information
Number of origins for which license metadata has been collected

Mine license information from the archive (as intrinsic metadata)#

Priority: high
Tags: Licence detection

Description:

Update indexers in order to generalize file scans for license information with latest tools. This approach is not exhaustive, because some files do not contain relevant information

Includes work:

Select the most accurate code-scanning engine for license detection (ScanCode, ..). Different strategies might be required for different levels (e.g. scan per project, or scan per file).
Update the actual license detection indexer
Deploy and run the updated indexer

KPIs:

Number of contents indexed per license type

The existing documentation is fairly extensive but somewhat unfocused. There is work scheduled to come up with personas to reflect on various Software Heritage stakeholders. Once that work is done, the existing documentation should be reviewed to identify who could be interested in which parts.

Includes work:

Review each piece of documentation.
Tag each page with the personas that could be interested.
Identify undocumented aspects.
Perform “low-hanging fruit” changes in the documentation.

KPIs:

Pages of the documentation tagged with a set of personas.
List of areas lacking documentation.
Update of the documentation landing page to better fit the different personas.

SWH Scanner #

Release a first version of the swh-scanner product #

Priority: high
Tags: Scanner

Description:

Industrialize and improve the swh-scanner CLI to provide a full-featured product ready for regular use. Octobus is handling a bunch of improvements under a NGI Search grant.

Includes work:

Improve industrialization and portability
Improve HTTP querying capabilities
Identify content (origin, version, CVE, licence)
Handle Exclusion patterns + VCS ignore definitions
Improve configuration and documentation
Implement progress indicators
Provide an enhanced result dashboard

KPIs:

Release and announce a first version of swh-scanner

SWH Sec #

Large scale archives retrieval (vault)#

Priority: medium
Tags: SWH Sec

Description:

Integrate massive caching facilities to the vault and setup a storage infrastructure in order to enable large-scale recovery of numerous projects

Includes work:

Specify heuristics for vault pre-cooking strategies
Design and implement vault pre-cooking services
Design the infrastructure requirements for cooking and storage
Deploy the vault caching solution in production

KPIs:

Vault caching system in production
Number of project cooked and stored in the cache

Certified Deposit #

Specify requirements for certified deposit #

Priority: low
Tags: Certified deposit

Description:

Specify the functional and technical requirements to create a certified timestamped deposit service

Includes work:

Interview stakeholders
Identify and describe the use cases
Review state of the art of certified timestamping
Specify the technical requirements

KPIs:

Validated specification

Institutional Portal #

Implement and deploy the institutional portal #

Priority: medium
Tags: Institutional portal

Description:

Implement and deploy the software artifacts for the Software Heritage Institutional Portal

Includes work:

Implement the backend services and APIs
Implement the web UI components
Setup a staging environment
Setup the production infrastructure
Deploy in production

KPIs:

Institutional portal operational in production
Number of portal instances

Design software architecture for the institutional portal #

Priority: medium
Tags: Institutional portal

Description:

Design the software architecture and UI/UX for the SWH institutional portal

Includes work:

Specify the UI/UX for an configurable webapp according to the specified use cases
Design the required APIs
Design the software architecture
Specify the infrastructure requirements

KPIs:

Validated UI mockup
Validated technical specification

Specify requirements for institutional portal #

Priority: high
Tags: Institutional portal

Description:

Specify the requirements for a Software Heritage Institutional Portal, to present, qualify and extract software catalogs for specific entities (institutions, administrations, ..)

Includes work:

Identify the categories of institutions that could require an institutional portal
Collect and analyse each institutions requirements
Specify use cases for a generic specification

KPIs:

List of described use cases
Generic specification for a Software Heritage Institutional Portal

Mirrors #

Documentation for mirror operators #

Priority: low
Tags: Mirrors

Description:

Publish a comprehensive documentation for mirror operators

Includes work:

Update the existing mirrors documentation
Publish and share the updated documentation

KPIs:

Published and up-to-date mirrors-operating documentation

Mirror tooling for scrubbing #

Priority: medium
Tags: Mirrors

Description:

Implement srubbing tools to control the integrity of the mirrors replayed data

Includes work:

Implement a scrubber for ENEA mirror

KPIs:

Coverage of ENEA archive scrubbed

Mirror tooling for mailmap #

Priority: high
Tags: Mirrors

Description:

Validate a policy and implement tools for mailmaps in the mirrors

Includes work:

Specify and validate the mailmap policy for mirrors
Validate whether the personal data transfer is ok for existing requests, preempt the issue for further requests
Design and implement tools for mirrors

KPIs:

Mailmap tools in production on active mirrors

Mirror tooling for takedown #

Priority: high
Tags: Mirrors

Description:

Setup SWH mirrors tooling for takedown requests in accordance with the [documented process](https://docs.softwareheritage.org/sysadm/mirror-operations/takedown-notices.html).

Includes work:

Design a workflow for a secure transfer of takedown requests data to mirrors
Implement the workflow and deploy the solution for existing mirrors
Provide mirrors with the SWH tools for takedown requests processing

KPIs:

Takedown notification pipeline in production for active mirrors
Takedown processing tools available for active mirrors
Usage statistics

SWH Mirror at Duisburg-Essen university #

Priority: medium
Tags: Mirrors

Description:

Collaborate with Duisburg-Essen university to create a SWH Mirror

Includes work:

Guidance and contribution to UniDue architecture and infrastructure choices
Specific developments if necessary (to be determined according to the chosen technical solutions)
Developments of tools for Winery replication (for Ceph-based object storage)
Help to deployment

KPIs:

validated architecture and first POC

Mirror instance at GRNET #

Priority: high
Tags: Mirrors

Description:

Collaborate with GRNET to create a SWH Mirror

Includes work:

Guidance and contribution to GRNET architecture and infrastructure choices
Specific developments if necessary (to be determined according to the chosen technical solutions)
Help to deployment

KPIs:

validated architecture and first POC

SWH.org Website #

Refactor the architecture of the SWH website #

Priority: high
Tags: SWH.org website

Description:

Refactor the architecture of the SWH Wordpress website, in order to integrate the latest upgrades and integrate new features to ease the content edition and management. Ideally it should use no or a very limited amount of extensions (for ease of self-maintainance). This migration work will be outsourced to an external provider.

Includes work:

Specify the technical and functional requirements
Cleanup the actual wordpress (unused pages and categories)
Update the testing platform to match the production website
Coordinate and validate the work of the provider

KPIs:

Upgraded website in production
New features available in production

SWH Archive Website #

Setup a Software Citation UI feature #

Priority: high
Tags: SWH archive website

Description:

Provide users with a web UI feature that enables to generate and export citations for Software artifacts (SWHID) in multiple formats, and display the citation requests per project

Includes work:

Design the right interface
Implement the UI feature in swh-web
Display the number of citation requests for a project

KPIs:

Available user-friendly UI for Software citation
Supported citation formats
Number of citation requests per project

Design presentation of Metadata on Web UI #

Priority: medium
Tags: SWH archive website

Description:

Design presentation of intrinsic and extrinsic metadata for any artifact on web UI and add linked data capabilities (Semantic Web solutions)

Includes work:

Specify the expected use cases
Design metadata view for Web UI
Allow export of metadata (in multiple formats - APA/ BibTeX/ CodeMeta/ CFF)
Assistance and contribution to CodeMeta
Add linked data capabilities

KPIs:

Specification and POC

Takedown notice management UI #

Priority: high
Tags: Mirrors, SWH archive website

Description:

Set up a workflow to handle takedown requests, manageable via a web UI

Includes work:

Validate the takedown workflow specification
Implement a web UI using a common workflow management tool (see product-management/swh-archive-website#3)
Specify the mechanism to trigger the takedown through the web UI, taking into account that a service able to remove data from the archive requires a lot of care

KPIs:

Takedown notice handling integrated to swh-web

SWH Core Platform #

Automate the production and publication of derived datasets #

Priority: high
Tags: SWH Sec

Description:

Provide tooling for an automated production and publishing of derived datasets

Includes work:

Design and implement the required automation tools
Setup and configure an automation pipeline
Provide a dashboard for monitoring

KPIs:

Number of derived datasets automatically published

Map software versions to objects in the archive #

Priority: medium
Tags: SWH Sec, Scanner

Description:

Several key use cases require to be able to identify objects in the archive related to specific software versions. This mapping needs to be implemented in the archive

Includes work:

Design and implement updates on the data model to store software version information
Specify heuristics and methods to establish the mapping between a software version and an object in the archive
Implement and run the tools to store the information

KPIs:

Number of software and versions identified in the archive

Investigate on forge discovery automation #

Priority: low
Tags:

Description:

Investigate on solutions for forges discovery automation, based on IP scanning tools

Includes work:

Identify and benchmark available tools
Setup a POC

KPIs:

POC

Precompute relevant characteristics of the graph #

Priority: medium
Tags:

Description:

Compute and store relevant characteristics of the graph, including size estimations and depth.

For each node:

expanded size (size of cooking as a directory/tarball)
effective/de-duplicated size (size of cooking as a git-bare repo)
subgraph size (number of nodes + edges)
depth of the subgraph
depth of the subgraph made of objects only of the same type eg. only commits (generation number)

Includes work:

Design and implement the required data model upgrades
Design and implement tools for computing the actual graph
Design and implement a solution to compute data in flight

KPIs:

% of the graph computed

Improve ingestion efficiency #

Priority: medium
Tags: SWH Sec

Description:

Improve ingestion efficiency to reduce the lag on major forges

Includes work:

Optimize loaders
Optimize scheduling policies

KPIs:

Number of out of date repos (absolute and per platform)
Total archive lag (e.g., in days)

Design and implement a unified software datamodel #

Priority: medium
Tags: Licence detection, SWH Sec

Description:

Create a unified data model to integrate software-related metadata (licence, CVE, issues, pull requests, discussions, comments…) for indexing, querying and retrieval.

Includes work:

Design a comprehensive and extensive data model (maybe drawing inspiration from or reusing ForgeFed specifications)
Implement the model in the SWH data model storage architecture

KPIs

types of data stored in the model

Deploy a unified software data model storage infrastructure #

Priority: medium
Tags: Licence detection, SWH Sec

Description:

Establish a scalable, robust and sustainable infrastructure to support the enrichment and intensive use of the Software Heritage archive for software-related metadata.

Includes work:

Identify and study possible architectural solutions for a unified model storage
Validate and design a solution for a unified software data model storage architecture
Specify and validate the required infrastructure for unified software data model storage
Deploy the required infrastructure for unified software data model storage

KPIs:

Infrastructure available in production
Performance indicators for massive queries

Enrich the archive with CVE metadata #

Priority: medium
Tags: SWH Sec

Description:

Integrate CVE metadata in the archive.

Includes work:

Design and implement a model to store CVE metadata
Design and implement a crawler to collect CVE metadata
Ingest the CVE metadata

KPIs:

% of CVE ingested in the archive

Enable inclusion filters in listers #

Priority: low
Tags:

Description:

Actual listers only enable to define exclusion filters (ex: archive all origins but those from a given directory).

In some cases, we need to apply inclusion filters (ex : archive only origins located in a given directory)

Includes work:

Design and implement an inclusion filter for all relevant listers

KPIs:

Number of inclusion filters applied in production

Recover the ingestion backlog #

Priority: medium
Tags: SWH Sec

Description:

Increase the horsepower for ingestion capacity in order to recover the ingestion backlog, temporarily using a large-scale computing platform.

Includes work:

Specify infrastructure requirements to deploy as many loaders as possible (wrt the storage bandwidth capacity)
Deploy the ingestion tooling on the infrastructure
Run the ingestion

KPIs:

GitHub lag recovered
Amount of resources used (CPU time, duration..)

Implement rate-limiting in swh-vault #

Priority: medium
Tags:

Description:

Implement a rate-limiting mechanism in swh-vault based on the computed size estimations of the nodes before cooking. The purpose of this feature is to prevent overload in some edge cases and possibly establish a rate-limiting system to avoid abusive usage of the vault.

Includes work:

Implement the cost-calculator
Implement the rate-limiting
Make it configurable according to the user profile

KPIs:

Rate-limiting activated on swh-vault in production
Number of rejected cooking requests
Number of cooked projects

Cassandra in production as primary storage #

Priority: high
Tags:

Description:

Use Cassandra as primary storage in production, in replacement of PostgreSQL

2023 history: https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/groups/swh/-/milestones/82#tab-issues

Includes work:

Benchmark the Cassandra infrastructure
Switch to Cassandra in production for primary storage

KPIs:

Replayed data validated
Live staging archive instance in parallel of the legacy postgresql instance
Live production archive instance in parallel of the legacy postgresql instance
Cassandra primary storage in staging
Cassandra primary storage in production

Scale-out objstorage in production as primary objstorage #

Priority: high
Tags:

Description:

Have the Ceph-based objstorage for SWH (Winery) in production as primary storage and set up equivalent MVP in staging (maybe use the same Ceph cluster for this)

2023 history: https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/groups/swh/-/milestones/83#tab-issues

Includes work:

Benchmark Ceph-based objstorage
Switch to Ceph-based objstorage as primary storage
Handle Mirroring

KPIs:

Ceph-based obj-storage in production as primary storage

Extend archive check and repair tools #

Priority: high
Tags:

Description:

Set up background jobs to regularly check - and repair when necessary - data validity, in all SWH data stores. This includes both blobs (swh-objstorage) and other graph objects (swh-storage) on all the copies (in-house, kafka, azure, upcoming mirrors, etc.)

2023 history: https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/groups/swh/-/milestones/103#tab-issues

Includes work:

Add scrubbing for the object storage
Add metrics and Grafana dashboard for scrubbing process
Automatically repair and recover objects found to be invalid (fixers)

KPIs:

List of scrubbers deployed in production
Monitoring tools deployed in production
Rolling report of operations per datastore including errors found and fixed at each iteration

Support archiving repositories containing SHA1 hash conflicts on blobs #

Priority: high
Tags:

Description:

Enable the possibility to use multiple hash types for objects checksums in order to get rid of the limitations imposed by having SHA1 as a primary key for the object storage internally.

Includes work:

Add tests on multiplexed object storages with different primary keys
Deployment of sha256-based swh.objstorage at CEA
Migrate swh.journal to use composite object keys for the content topic

KPIs:

Multiple hash storage facility in production
Ability to archive git repos that contains sample SHAttered collisions blobs (they are currently detected and refused)

Release a Bulk On-demand Archival feature #

Priority: high
Tags:

Description:

Provide a solution for bulk archival of large amounts of origins, using the same logic as Save Code Now but different queues in order to avoid swamping the Save Code Now queue, whose purpose is to almost instantly archive a single origin at a time.

Includes work:

Specify the user requirements
Design a technical solution
Implement the tooling and an API
Define the access restrictions to the feature
Deploy the solution in production

KPIs:

Total number of origins archived using bulk save code now
Average number of origins per bulk request

Design and implement a provenance search API v1 #

Priority: medium
Tags: Scanner

Description:

Provide an API that enables to retrieve the probable first origin for a given content, based on swh-provenance and swh-graph.

Includes work:

Validate the provenance index data
Design the provenance API endpoints
Implement the provenance REST API and the required backend APIs
Design and deploy a provenance infrastructure in production
Deploy the Provenance REST API v1 in production

KPIs:

API available in production

Provide an executive-friendly monitoring of services #

Priority: low
Tags:

Description:

Provide a high-level and easy to find dashboard of running services with documented key indicators.

Includes work:

Gather public site metrics
Publish and document a dedicated dashboard
Add links to it on common web applications (web app and docs.s.o)

KPIs:

Indicators available for public sites status
Indicators for archive workers status
Indicators for archive behavior
Main dashboard that aggregates the indicators
Dashboard referenced in common web applications

Graph export and graph compression in production #

Priority: high
Tags: SWH Sec

Description:

Have the graph compression pipeline running in production with less then a month of lag Deployment, hosting and pipeline tooling

2023 history: https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/groups/swh/-/milestones/59#tab-issues

Includes work:

Finish the refactoring (rewriting in Rust)
Setup an automatic scheduled generation
Provide a dashboard for monitoring

KPIs:

Graph compression pipeline in production
Last update date / number of updates per year

Setup swh webhook for vault cooking #

Priority: low
Tags: SWH archive website

Description:

Implement a webhook for vault cooking based on swh-webhooks architecture

Includes work:

Write and validate a specification
Design the user interface to configure the webhook in the SWH webapp
Implement and deploy the solution

KPIs:

Webhook deployed in production
Usage statistics

Setup swh webhook for Deposit #

Priority: low
Tags: SWH archive website

Description:

Implement a webhook for deposit based on swh-webhooks architecture

Includes work:

Write and validate a specification
Design the user interface to configure the webhook in the SWH webapp
Implement and deploy the solution

KPIs:

Webhook deployed in production
Usage statistics

Sysadmin tooling for Takedown notices #

Priority: high
Tags:

Description:

The swh-alter module has been developed to improve automation capabilities of the sysadmin tools for takedown notices processing. It’s a CLI tool that provides an admin interface for takedown actions, aiming at covering deletion capabilities for both the storage (Postrges, Cassandra, Kafka journal client) and the object storage (ZFS, Ceph/Winery, Azure and S3). It also provides an encrypted recovery bundle mechanism to be able to rollback deletion upon error.

Includes work:

Wire deletion in Elastic Search
Wire deletion on Azure and S3
End-to-end testing on staging
Configure for production environment

KPIs:

Production-ready sysadmin swh-alter tooling
Number of takedown requests processed using swh-alter