[DEPR]: xqueue and xqueue-watcher

[leangseu-edx]

Proposal Date

2023-08-08

Target Ticket Acceptance Date

2024-10-01

Earliest Open edX Named Release Without This Functionality

S release, October 2024

Rationale

xqueue is an application for managing queued tasks in edx-platform LMS. It primarily supports two use cases, one of which has already been deprecated:

1. Certificate creation was already deprecated and removed when the edx-certificates repository was archived as part of DEPR-155.

2. Grading of student-submitted code, for which there are two well-known clients:

   1. MatLab xQueue, which has already been deprecated
   2. xqueue-watcher, which is part of this deprecation issue.

xqueue-watcher is an xqueue client for running and evaluating student-submitted code.

Maintaining and updating two different applications to serve one uncommon use case is not the best user of resources – in particular when there are many more-functional alternatives that are under active development.

Removal

• xqueue repo
• xqueue-watcher repo
• capa problem support for xqueue, including https://github.com/openedx/edx-platform/blob/master/xmodule/capa/xqueue_interface.py
• configuration from https://github.com/openedx/configuration
• remove internal configurations
• remove internal terraform configurations

Replacement

• Certificate creation has already been moved to Studio as part of DEPR-155 and DEPR-160.
• Student-submitted MATLAB code be graded via LTI with MATLAB Grader from Mathworks
• Grading of student-submitted code via xqueuewatcher can also be replaced by LTI. There are several saas platforms for code grading, like Codio or Vocareum.
• There is also an open source xBlock for code grading, https://github.com/EmpowrOrg/CodeEditorXblock

Deprecation

No response

Migration

No response

Additional Info

No response

[NotoriousMKD]

Hello! We use xqueue and xqueue-watcher in our on-campus instance of open edX. Our faculty won't be able to devote time to rewriting their problems for a new system until next summer, so we request that the deprecation be postponed until the 2024-12 named release.

[dianakhuang]

We have updated the acceptance date to October 2024 to accommodate migrations off xqueue problems that need to happen.

[dianakhuang]

@pdpinch would you be interested in being the owner for this ticket and helping to push it forward? We're trying to ensure that all active deprecation tickets have owners.