Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, June 1, 2021

Attendees

Han-Wen Nienhuys, Luca Milanesio, Patrick Hiesel, Saša Živkov

Place/Date/Duration

Online, June 1, 11:00 - 12:00 CET

Next meeting

Jul 6, 2021 - 11:00 - 12:00 CET

Minutes

Moving to use main branch name for the Gerrit repository

master is a term that we do not use anymore in the Gerrit project, but we still use it as the name of the main development branch. A consensus is that we should start developing against a new main branch in Gerrit. The old master branch is going to be removed.

The creation of new projects with an initial commit should be amended to use main instead of master.

Support for Gerrit v2.16

Gerrit v2.16 is still currently supported to allow users to migrate to any v3.x version: all schemas migrations from any v2.x release, including the conversion to NoteDb, require to go through that version.

The Community is still spending a considerable effort to keep the change validation active for the stable-2.16 branch. However, that is not sustainable in the longer term because of the burden of supporting deprecated and obsolete machinery.

The ESC consensus is that the special EOL status of Gerrit v2.16 will end when v3.5 is released. Existing v2.x users can continue to use the published artifacts and the associated plugins on the GerritForge’s archive.

The move is going to be largely publicised on the mailing list so that all Gerrit users can have plenty of advance notification and take action before the move.

Existing users having issues with the migration to Gerrit v2.16 could request bug fixes and ad-hoc releases through any vendor that provides Enterprise Support.

Accidental breakage of the conflicts UI in v3.4

During the release of Gerrit v3.4.0, the functionality of displaying of conflicting changes was accidentally broken. The problem went unnoticed because there are not specific test validating the feature, and it is not used anymore in any of Google’s *-review.googlesource.com sites.

The breakage happened on Gerrit master and was later cherry-picked onto the stable-3.4, self-approved, before the RC3, aligned with the Gerrit v3.4 release plan policies.

The consensus is that self-approval of changes should be disabled on Gerrit and features that are not largely adopted or properly tested should be deprecated and later removed.

Review of open designs

The review of the Gerrit events compatibility design document is mostly stalled, with some comments still unanswered and the focus unclear.

Han-Wen took the action of documenting the Gooogle’s Gerrit events system and publish to the Gerrit Community so that it can be used as blueprint for future work in the open-source code-base.