[DEPR]: BLOCK_STRUCTURES_SETTINGS['PRUNING_ACTIVE'] in edx-platform

[feanil]

Proposal Date

9 February 2021

Ticket Acceptance Date

1 March 2021

Technology Removal Date

TBD

First Open edX Named Release Without This Functionality

TBD

Rationale

See removal section.

Removal

Removing: Toggle labeled 'BLOCK_STRUCTURES_SETTINGS['PRUNING_ACTIVE']. The toggle has the following annotation as a description:

When True, only a specified number of versions of block structure files are kept for each structure, and the rest are cleaned up. The number of versions that are kept can be specified in the BlockStructureConfiguration, which can be edited in Django Admin. The default number of versions that are kept is 5.

This setting current defaults to False, but we will be setting it as True to avoid having issues when deprecating block_structure.storage_backing_for_cache, which we will make default to True. See https://openedx.atlassian.net/browse/DEPR-145
. Keeping this feature enabled helps prevent run away storage use.

Replacement

No replacement is intended as no use case can be found for disabling it. It will stay enabled, keeping cached versions of block structure in storage.

Deprecation

No response

Migration

No response

Additional Info

Original Jira Issue: https://openedx.atlassian.net/browse/DEPR-146

Original Context Conversation: https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/pull/26175/files#r565801078

[feanil]

This was announced a while back: https://discuss.openedx.org/t/deprecation-removal-several-block-structure-caching-settings-depr-143-depr-144-depr-145-depr-146/4288

We can mark it as communicated.

[dianakhuang]

We have a PR to address this, but we need to figure out what's going on with the test failures: openedx/edx-platform#32496