Officially deprecate notification post-filtering mechanism

Development
,
#1

Hi everyone,

I’m opening this vote to officially deprecate our post-filtering mechanism for notifications.
We introduced the pre-filtering mechanism in notifications in 12.x cycle, and it’s the default mechanism since 2 LTS now. This new mechanism has been put in place for solving important scalability issues.

However, we have still documentation about the capability to switch back to post-filtering, see: https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Notifications%20Application/#HPre-orpost-filtering

The proposal about officially deprecating this mechanism involves that we don’t need to fix anymore the issues related to post-filtering in current LTS and stable. And that we simply remove the related mechanism in 15.x cycle.

The rationale is that to my knowledge we do not have usecases for which post-filtering would be needed, and it’s a lot of work to keep maintaining it and keep fixing old issues related to it. As a very simple example I’m working on [XWIKI-17086] RecordableEvents produced by guest user are not properly displayed - XWiki.org JIRA and I’m sure the behaviour changed drastically thanks to pre-filtering. Moreover, I don’t think we currently perform any test (automated or manual) related to post-filtering. So de facto, this feature is already deprecated IMO.

This vote is opened until last week, it will be closed on 5th of April 2022.
Here’s my +1 to mark it officially deprecated and document it that way.

#2

+1

#3

+1 !

#4

+0 because I won’t be able to help with the code.

But from a functional pov +1 with no hesitation, pre-filtering makes a lot of sense, I don’t see a fundamental functional limitation in the fact that notifications of users will always be pre-filtered.

Thanks!

#5

So I’m now closing this vote: with 3 +1 and 1 +0 I officially announced the deprecation of post-filtering mechanism. It’s announced on https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Notifications%20Application/#HPre-orpost-filtering and in xwiki.properties through that commit: [Misc] Notifications post-filtering is now deprecated · xwiki/xwiki-platform@94b3bcf · GitHub

Note that I remained vague about when we should remove the post-filtering mechanism since it might be part of another vote.