Impact Framework Project Updates 2024-06-20

## Who

Sponsor: @jawache (GSF)
Product owner: @jmcook1186 (GSF)
Leads: @navveenb (Accenture), @srini1978 (Microsoft)

## Overview

Over the past two weeks we have been focusing on three things:

- shipping the new `if-env` command line tool
- overhauling our error handling protocol
- added tutorials on creating pipelines for common patterns to our if-docs
- preparing the next epic

We released IF v0.4.0 which includes our `if-diff` tool and the new `--debug` flag as well as upgraded logging functionality.

We also deployed our new [Explorer](https://explorer.if.greensoftware.foundation) website where anyone can share or search for plugins!

Don't forget you can still participate in the discussions around our next epic here:

* Exhaust Scripts: https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/if/discussions/766
* Simplify Config: https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/if/discussions/767
* Idempotence : https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/if/discussions/768
* Global Time-sync: https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/if/discussions/771
* Parameter Metadata: https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/if/discussions/772

## Updates

Here's the details for our most significant updates this fortnight:

- [`if-env`](https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/if/issues/636): This CLI tool allows you to easily create execution environments for IF manifests

- [Error handling protocols](#593 )

- [Pipeline documentation](https://if.greensoftware.foundation/pipelines/)

We also **deprecated our `if-plugins` and `if-unofficial-plugins`** repositories. We won't remove anything for now to make sure we don't break anyone's pipeliens, but we will not be actively maintaining these repositories from now on - all development on `if-plugins` is happening in `builtins` which come bundled in IF.

## Issues

We realized that our plan to implement phased execution, where time-sync is always executed between `regroup` and `compute` will be dificult unless we update our builtins to handle zero values more gracefully. This is because time-sync can in-fill missing values with zeroes in some cases, which will break the `compute` phase of the execution. Therefore, we've added an issue to handle zeroes more gracefully.
https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/if/issues/850

## Outlook
* Finalise the error logging and automated testing to ensure a smooth release.
* #638
* #621
* #593
* Document latest changes and update support materials
* #602
* #839
* #829
* #603
* Start developing the phased execution and simplified configuration features.
* #850
* #846
* #762
* #765