Update Technology Recommendations and Related Decisions

[feanil]

OEP-67 recommendations that need to be reviewed and potentially updated.

Updates to existing recommendations

• Codecov is generally recommended not just recommended for the frontend, add a new overall ADR to reflect this general recommendation.

Historic Standards that need notes and ADRs

• Django
• DRF
• drf-yasg
• tox
• pytest
• edx-lint

Related: Frontend changes

#524
#480

[sarina]

@feanil in order to facilitate me finding some people to help out with this, is there any more detail you could add around the "Historic Standards"? I'm not sure how anyone would write ADRs for some of the basic ones like Django. And does edx-lint not have some stuff existing about why it was created?

[feanil]

Many of the de-facto technologies don't have a lot of history about why they were picked. I think the why they were chosen over other things is less important than summarizing that we have chosen these things and that they are the current standard for this project. For example, we don't need the summary for Django to justify Django as much as we need it to acknowledge and codify that "By default any backend webserver that interacts with databases in the Open edX project, should use Django as the framework. Django has a lot of reasonable defaults and security capabilities built in and the community is already familiar with it, currently we are not looking to add other technologies as alternatives to Django for backend webservers."

[sarina]

OK, that makes sense. This feels like a ticket many people could pick up a part of, I'll edit the description to be checkboxes.

[sarina]

To anyone picking this up: I suspect we should hold off on expanding a Codecov recommendation until we figure out if Codecov remains the best tool for the job (recent changes in Codecov has made it a less reliable service)

[sarina]

@feanil this issue has been open since 2023. Is there still value in pursuing it? I don't feel like I have the context to write these ADRs and I'm not sure who would be able to put in the effort to do so.

[feanil]

I think this would be valuable for documenting a bunch of our norms but I have not been able to prioritize this work. I think it's worth leaving this here to capture the goals for us to pick up in the future.