Engineering Steering Committee Meetings, June 25, 2025

Participants: Edwin Kempin [EK], Luca Milanesio [LM], Saša Živkov [SZ]

Next meeting: July 30, 2025

Executive Summary

[LM] provided a status update of the issues with packed-refs and the status of reftable testing, including pending issues with C Git. For the forthcoming Gerrit User Summit 2025, there is interest in AI features for Gerrit Review which will be reported by [LM] in his proposed talk.

Issues with packed-refs

[SZ] detailed the current status of the packed-refs issues and their mitigation strategy for the backdraft file issue, which involves a script to repair everything using a global-refdb maintaining backups.

[LM] mentioned that their team has observed other strange issues related to concurrency between deletion of refs and packing of the refs, including reverted refs during repacking and the return of removed refs. A bug in the locking system for deleting refs was identified and fixed by Dani.

[LM] also highlighted a POSIX compatibility issues with some specific NFS implementation, where data written to a file and closed was not immediately visible to another node after performing the open of the file after the closing on the other node.

reftable test status

[LM] provided a positive update on extensive testing with reftable, noting that a problem involving an unexpected closed file descriptor has been identified and a straightforward fix is expected. They suggested adding [SZ] as a reviewer, as a stable reftable could be a much better alternative to packed-refs due to scalability issues. [LM] emphasized the significant problem with deleting refs in packed-refs, which requires rewriting the entire file. Testing of reftable is also being done on NFS.

[LM] mentioned that C Git still has many issues with regards to reftable, including corruption of the refs, and expressed a need to identify specific test cases.

Gerrit User Summit in Paris, 17–19 October 2025

Regarding the Gerrit User Summit in Paris, [SZ] stated that their initial plan to organize a hackathon there faced issues, and they will recheck the possibility of at least one or two team members attending just for the summit.

AI features in Gerrit Code Review

[LM] highlighted the ai-features topic on Gerrit Review related to AI features. [EK] clarified that their AI focus is currently internal for Googlers. [SZ] had also seen the feature, noting that the AI prompt appeared self-contained. [SZ] expressed interest in the Gerrit community consolidating ideas for AI integrations, mentioning a question from SAP about AI-based automation.