Epic: 2025 Deferred Maintenance

[jefferya]

A list of deferred maintenance items discovered while updating Rails to 7.2 (and 8.1) plus adopting a new supported fork of the Comfy CMS Gem / Rails Engine - PR#885 - a stream-of-consciousness document. The purpose of this issue is to start a discussion about prioritization and about which should be addressed in 2026 and which should be deferred to a later date (sub-issue creation encouraged).

1. Rails 7.2 end-of-life: Aug 2026

• PR Update Rails to v8.1 #884 updates to Rails 8.1 (end-of-life Oct 2027; 2 years after release)
• Deprecation warning about "hash argument controller" will be removed in Rails 8.2

2. sprockets-rails versus propshaft: Rails v8 introduces a new asset pipeline tool. The Library-CMS app minimally uses sprockets-rails. A refactoring would simplify the codebase following reasons in Rails Asset Pipeline

3. Related to (2), Dart Sass function deprecation warnings from both the CMS Gem and Library CMS app regarding function removal in Dart Sass v3.0.0. The Rails 8 asset pipeline allow for the removal of Sass because recent browsers with recent version of CSS provide many/most of the features provided by Sass and the removal of Sass decreases complexity. Changes will be needed to either support the new Sass functions or move away from Sass.

• Note in SCSS file all CSS comes from Ualberta's main website or external CDN's: is Sass needed?

4. ruby 3.3.x eol March 2027 (3.4.x 2028 Mar; v4.0 not supported in the Gemfile)

5. MariaDB updates to 11.4+ may need a Library-CMS config update to address the SSL https://mariadb.com/docs/release-notes/community-server/11.4/what-is-mariadb-114#ssl-tls

• a mariadb-client v10 will not connect to a v11.4+ server without --disable-ssl or --disable-ssl-verify-server-cert to revert to the old behavior.

6. Related to (2), is bundling needed or does is add additional complexity that should be removed to ease maintenance? The CMS Gem comes with its own asset handing and the Library-CSM app has little javascript. Could these be removed: jsbundling-rails or cssbundling-rails?

7. Browserslist: browsers data (caniuse-lite) is 7 months old. Please run: npx update-browserslist-db@latest
   Why you should do it regularly: https://github.com/browserslist/update-db#readme

8. Update of the DB seeds to help with test on staging and within this repository.

9. Test suite is minimal. I'm my opinion if the tool has a longer-term place, the test suite should be expanded. Prioritise in conjunction with what the Web Team identifies as most important.

10. NodeJs v22 .tool-version end-of-life: April 30, 2027

In progress

• CMS Gem replacement to a supported fork: PR#885
• Rails 8.1 update PR#884 as Rails 7.2 end-of-life is Aug 2026
  • PR Update Rails to v8.1 #884 updates to Rails 8.1 (end-of-life Oct 2027; 2 years after release)

[jefferya]

The view from release build is documented here:
#880 (comment)