Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, July 23 2019

Attendees

David Pursehouse, Alice Kober-Sotzek, Patrick Hiesel

Place/Date/Duration

Online, July 23, 12:30 - 13:15 CEST

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on August 6, 12:30 CEST.

Minutes

Gerrit News Page

There are still no contributions for the next edition of the project news, which is due to be published at the end of this month.

REST API for retrieving Git trees

The design document was reviewed and the general feeling is that the feature is being proposed as a helper to an external implementation of signing GPG commits in the UI. We feel it would be better to look into how Gerrit can natively support GPG commit signing.

Alice will post feedback on the design document.

Redesign of external IDs

Discussion is still ongoing in Patrick’s proposed redesign of external IDs.

Patrick has also proposed an alternative solution that doesn’t require a full redesign of the external IDs. The idea is to try this solution and see if it fixes the issues that were being addressed by the redesign.

If the alternative solution does not fix the issues, we will go back to the redesign and make a committee decision on whether to proceed.

Pluggable authentication backend

Support for a pluggable authentication backend has been on the table since 2012 but has stalled several times.

A design was proposed by Dariusz Luksza (CollabNet) and received several comments during the hackathon hosted by Axis in April last year, but then stalled again.

CollabNet has a working implementation based on Gerrit 2.15, but it is not in a suitable condition to be pushed for review. It is probably better to start again from scratch either on master or stable-3.0.

Patrick and Alice agreed that such a feature would be good for Gerrit, from an architectural point of view. Patrick will check internally at Google whether they will be able to provide a team member to work on this in the ‘mentor’ role, with the assumption that the implementation will be done by CollabNet.

Joint meeting with community managers

A joint meeting between the ESC and community managers has been scheduled in September.