Constitutive meeting of the engineering steering committee for the 2019 term

Today the first and constitutive meeting of the Engineering Steering Committee took place in-person in Munich. This post contains a short summary of the topics that were covered. We are looking forward to working with you on making these ideas become a reality

Attendees

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

Place/Date/Duration

Munich, May 16, 11am - 12:30pm

Minutes

Project Homepage

The homepage should have a place to list maintainers (both active and past) as well as a place to list ESC members (both active and past).

The current homepage has a number of downsides (requires a manual push, compiles markdown to HTML, limited in what the output can look like). We want to look into other options that alleviate some of these. We will approach the wider community with a proposal once it materializes to seek input.

Meeting Schedule

Further Meetings will be Tuesdays, 12:30pm MUC time. The cadence we start with is bi-weekly.

Governance Documentation

Edwin’s remaining governance documentation changes have enough community support that they can be merged, so ESC will vote and submit. Further modifications are always possible through iterative changes.

Maintainers

Through rotating jobs, a lot of Google-maintainers became inactive. We will approach them to see if they are interested in contributing in the future or would be OK with giving up maintainership status.

New maintainers, especially new hires on the Google teams, need to pass the same bar as everyone else to become a maintainer (that was alleviated for Ole and Ben because they took over the complete frontend from scratch). They might pass that bar faster though as they spend the majority of time on Gerrit.

Future Events

For future Gerrit events (user summits/hackathons) we could try to collocate them with other events (e.g. JGit conference, etc.) to provide more benefit to users who attend.

Design Documents

The ESC will process the input we got from the hackathon (especially around design docs) and send around a concrete proposal including the first 1-2 design docs adhering to the template for the community to give feedback on.

Bug Tracker

Our bugtracker has come of age, so we want to investigate other options. As soon as concrete proposals materialize, they will be presented to get feedback.