Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, July 7, 2021

Attendees

Han-Wen Nienhuys, Luca Milanesio, Saša Živkov, Albert Cui

Place/Date/Duration

Online, July 7, 17:30 - 18:30 CET

Next meeting

September 15, 2021 - 17:30 - 18:30 CET

Minutes

Next steps for case-insensitive username matching

The design is currently blocked on the decision as to whether Gerrit can completely drop support for case-sensitive usernames. This change is already on master and would require an offline conversion of any duplicate accounts.

The ESC discussed the results from the recently ran Gerrit Community Survey which had a question about how identity providers handle usernames. The results showed that 64% of providers use case-insensitive usernames and over 19% use case-sensitive names. However, the question was not very useful for determining whether Gerrit can deprecate support for case-sensitive names as the survey didn’t ask whether or not that would be an issue for administrators.

The consensus was to send out a few follow up questions to the community in order to more explicitly gage whether we can drop support for case-sensitive usernames.

GerritForge will look into contributing a change for online migration to enable zero-downtime upgrades in Gerrit v3.5.

Roadmap Updates

The ESC discussed discrepancies between the published Gerrit roadmap and the planning cycles of our individual organizations.

Going forward, Google will update the roadmap with respect to its quarterly planning cycle.

GerritForge uses both an annual planning process as well as a free-form Kanban-based process where anyone can contribute ideas to an non-public board. However, GerritForge works in the open so any active work can be seen in the Gerrit issue tracker and on reviews. The near term priorities are improving replication, working mostly in JGit. As the Gerrit roadmap only covers Gerrit specific items, we discussed the need to find a place to surface these planned changes.