Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, September 17, 2019

Attendees

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

Place/Date/Duration

Online, September 17, 12:30 - 13:30 CEST

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on October 1, 12:30 CEST.

Minutes

Gerrit News Page

The next issue of the project news is due to be published on September 27th.

David has uploaded a draft with brief items about the user summit in Gothenburg, plans for releasing Gerrit 3.1, and the new code of conduct. It’s not necessary to include a lot of information since we already have separate posts which are linked. We expect that there will also be a separate post announcing the code of conduct once it’s submitted.

Further items can be added later. The post will not appear on the homepage until September 27th and only after it gets moved to the _posts folder.

Plans for support of Bazel 1.0

Work has been ongoing, driven mainly by David Ostrovsky, to make sure that core Gerrit and the plugins are still buildable with recent Bazel versions on stable-2.14 and later. The plan is to continue this activity on stable-2.14 and stable-2.15 only until Bazel 1.0 is released, and then we will only make Bazel specific changes on stable-2.16 and later.

Review of open design documents and clarification of the design-driven process

We briefly discussed, but did not review in detail, the design documents for sub-checks and permission tests.

Alice pointed out that design documents are not mandatory for plugins, but in this case it was written to make collaboration easier.

Alice will follow up with Gal Paikin, the author of the permission tests design, about that review.

We discussed whether the ESC should always be involved in the review of design documents. The conclusion was that it’s not always necessary; it depends on the proposed feature and whether there are concerns/questions raised in the review that require escalation. However, it was proposed that at least one member of the ESC should be involved in the review to ensure that it progresses and does not get stale.

It was also suggested that we should encourage people to send an email to the project mailing list when a new design is uploaded, however this should not be a mandatory step. We should also be careful to keep the discussion of the design in the review on Gerrit rather than in the mail thread.

Ben will propose updates to the design process documentation. This is tracked in issue 40011250

Consolidation of mock framework for tests

We currently use easymock in core tests, and provide mockito for plugins. It was proposed in issue 40005348 to consolidate to a single mock framework.

Everyone agreed that it would be better to switch to mockito. David has already looked into this, and will continue with it.

We will aim to make the transition from easymock to mockito in Gerrit 3.1.

Support for Java 11

David Ostrovsky has been driving the effort to support Java 11.

We will define Java 11 support as experimental and release Gerrit 3.1 with Java 8.

We will continue with the effort to support Java 11, and will build on CI with both Java 8 and Java 11, to help with verification of Java 11.

We will consider dropping Java 8 in a later release when Gerrit is stable on Java 11 and there is wider adoption of Java 11 in the community.

Support for the checks plugin in Gerrit 3.0

In issue 40011210 it was reported that the checks plugin does not build against Gerrit 3.0.

According to comments from Edwin on that issue, and from Alice in the meeting, to build the plugin on 3.0 will require core changes to be backported from master. This will take some effort, and we would rather not do it. We will instead aim to get the plugin working with the upcoming 3.1 release. Alice will create issues in monorail to track remaining features that are needed on the plugin.

We also discussed whether or not the checks plugin should be promoted to a core plugin with the 3.1 release. See issue 40011251.

Support for git protocol v2

There is a series of changes pending to re-add support for git protocol v2, but it has stalled. See change 227901 and its ancestors.

We would like to get v2 support into Gerrit 3.1, but the changes need to be reviewed by Googlers. Alice will follow up on this.

The series of changes also includes support for building JGit from source, which we discussed in the previous meeting.

Global ref database

Change 237177 adds support for a global ref database that can be used by plugins. During the review Marco Miller requested that the change be moved to master and a design document be written.

Luca will follow up with Marcin Czech, the change author, and bring it to the next ESC meeting. See issue 40011189.

Requests from retrospective

Two issues were raised against ESC during the project retrospective at the recent user summit.

  • Issue 40011165: Track ESC work items in the issue tracker

    We agreed that it’s not clear how to contact ESC members, and we should improve this.

    Generally the ESC work items are small and are tracked in the minutes, so we’re not sure if it’s useful to track them in the issue tracker, however we have created an ESC component that can be used to raise issues to ESC members’ attention. When this component is added to an issue all ESC members are automatically CC’d.

    We will also create a mailing list. This will align us with the way that the community managers are working. We will update the community documentation accordingly.

    Progress on this can be followed in issue 40011165.

  • Issue 40011164: Create an open roadmap for Gerrit 3.1 and beyond.

    We agree that a roadmap is needed, and we already identified some features that should be on the roadmap for 3.1, but we ran out of time to discuss it in detail during this meeting.

    We will come back to this in the next meeting, with the aim of presenting a roadmap during the upcoming user summit in November.