Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, July 9 2019

Attendees

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

Place/Date/Duration

Online, July 9, 12:30 - 13:15 CEST

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on July 23, 12:30 CEST.

Minutes

Gerrit News Page

The next edition of the project news was postponed until the end of July, and will contain news about what has happened in June and July.

Instead of brainstorming ideas for the news during the meeting, it was decided to consider it offline and upload suggestions to the existing draft post on the homepage project.

Upcoming Gerrit User Summits in Gothenburg and Sunnyvale

The “Prolog-less submit rules” talk was already given during the last summit in the USA. It can be dropped from the schedule for Sunnyvale and only be presented in Gothenburg for the benefit of European attendees.

REST API for retrieving Git trees

A design document for “Add a new REST API to retrieve trees” is still pending, so a full discussion is postponed until the next meeting.

Soy migration documentation

The soy project includes Google-specific links that are not publicly accessible. See issue 177.

Patrick will follow up internally at Google to discuss how this can be improved.

Redesign of external IDs

Patrick’s proposed redesign of external IDs has received mostly positive feedback, with some valid points raised by Martin about atomic ref updates.

Luca proposed to hold a lightning talk at the Gotherburg summit to present the new design. Patrick agreed to do that; although he is not attending the summit he will join remotely.

The design doc will cook for a few more days to see how points can be addressed and to add more details where needed.

Owner/maintainer of the replication plugin

Luca raised the question of who is the main stakeholder/owner/maintainer of the replication plugin, since there are several open changes that are pending review.

David proposed that the main stakeholders are SAP (Saša), Ericsson (Marco), CollabNet (David) and GerritForge (Luca), while Google isn’t using it.

Joint meeting with community managers

Edwin suggested that we have a joint meeting between ESC and the community managers.

We agreed that this is a good idea, but it may be difficult to find a time slot that works for everyone due to the different time zones. On the other hand, it is perhaps not necessary for all members to attend.

Polymer 2 and themes

Luca asked about how theming with Polymer 2 will work. Ben explained that arbitrary css styling as currently possible will not be possible any more with Shadow DOM. However it should be noted that the current ‘support’ was never official; the recommended and documented approach is still to override css properties from plugins that use registerStyleModule(). We are open to adding more css properties and will have to see how much of an issue this becomes.

Quota backend changes

The changes started by Jacek during the last hackathon are still pending. Patrick had previously reviewed them and left some comments, which have since been addressed, but the new patch sets were uploaded during Patrick’s vacation. Patrick will review them again soon.

New Gitiles releases

Per the discussion in the previous meeting, a stable branch has been created on gitiles and new releases have been made which include the fix for the recent regression. The version numbering scheme was not changed; this can be done later if really needed.