Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, September 1, 2020

Attendees

Ben Rohlfs, Alice Kober-Sotzek, Patrick Hiesel, Luca Milanesio

Place/Date/Duration

Online, September 1, 12:30 - 13:30 CEST

Next meeting

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

Minutes

CI Results Tab and Composable Submit Rules

Ben and Patrick have met with all interested stakeholders and the feedback loop is closing this week. Luca will take a final look at both docs on Friday and approve if no major blockers surface until then.

Roadmap

We discussed if the roadmap should include generic items or rather be very specific. Recent discussions have shown that if it’s too specific adding items triggers discussions that already anticipate discussions that would usually happen on design docs (“how” and “why” not “what”). This seemingly discourages contributors from adding items to the roadmap, which is not what we want.

The roadmap will therefore stay generic and contributors should feel encouraged to add plans they have.

Items can be backed by tracking bugs if the owner wants that.

Gerrit 3.3

We discussed plans for the 3.3 release and are targeting a release in November with branches being cut in October. Luca will drive the release. Google will check if there are internal resources to support this effort, which was unclear at the time of the meeting.

Luca would also reach out other maintainers that would be willing to help with the release.

New maintainership

The nomination for a new maintainer is progressing well and will conclude on Thursday.

Gerrit Event Bus

Luca raised the priority of the redesign of the Gerrit events, which is not in any of the next release plans. GerritForge is willing to drive the effort, assuming that there is consensus in supporting the initiative by Google and other companies contributing to Gerrit.

Alice, who initially raised the issue during the Hackathon 2019 in Munich, is not currently planning to make progress, but will handover her notes to Luca so that the effort can be carried over for making it an official proposal.

Luca will follow up with a list of problems that GerritForge is having with the current event system.

Open designs

Besides the CI results tab and Composable Submit Rules, we discussed deletion of groups. Alice volunteered to write a conclusion. The feature should be implemented in a plugin so that the auditability of groups remains intact in core.