Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, October 15, 2019

Attendees

David Pursehouse, Luca Milanesio, Patrick Hiesel

Place/Date/Duration

Online, October 15, 12:30 - 13:00 CEST

Next meeting

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

Minutes

Gerrit News Page

The next issue of the project news is due to be published on November 29.

So far it only contains one item by Edwin about the new plugin steering group.

There were no new items proposed during this meeting. Patrick will follow up with the frontend team at Google to see if they have anything to add related to their recent work.

Members of the community may propose items by adding a change on the draft post.

Security issue with LDAP and Java 11

Issue 40011278 reports that LDAP startTLS doesn’t work as expected on Java 11 and is marked as a security issue.

There has been a lot of discussion around the issue, and the conclusion is that it’s an issue with Java 11 rather than with Gerrit. Since Java 11 is not yet an officially supported runtime anyway, this issue doesn’t need restricted visibility.

Status and metrics for gerrit-review.googlesource.com

Luca pointed out that recently the performance of gerrit-review has been slow, and requested that some kind of status page be provided so that users can see if there are any known issues. Patrick will look into this.

Scaling Gerrit

Patrick mentioned that some Gerrit features don’t perform well at scale, for example the mergeability indexing. This is discussed in more detail in these design documents.

In general, we agreed that it’s better to first attempt to find a way to improve scaling performance, but if that doesn’t work then we should prefer to allow the feature to be optionally enabled/disabled rather than completely removing it.

Renaming of ‘reviewdb’ package to ‘entities’

In the previous meeting it was agreed that we will go ahead with the package rename for Gerrit 3.1. David Ostrovsky has rebased the change and associated plugin changes, and it is now ready to be approved and submitted. Alice was working on this, but is away at the moment, so Patrick will take over.

Building JGit from source

The change that adds support to build Jgit from source is now working as expected and only lacks the Library-Compliance vote. Patrick agreed to apply that vote so that the change can be submitted.

Migration of Lucene indices to use dimensional types

The series of changes to migrate the Lucene based secondary indices to use dimensional types is still pending, and is marked as blocking the 3.1 release. Although the changes are related to Lucene they also required some changes in the Elasticsearch implementation, so David asked Patrick to have a look at them to check if they will also have impact on Google’s index backend.

Follow up on blocking issues for 3.1

Per the release plan for 3.1 we expect to cut the stable-3.1 branch and make the first release candidate at the end of this week.

We had a look at the list of issues that are labelled Blocking-3.1 and the open changes that have the hashtag blocking-3.1. Aside from the changes already discussed in this meeting, there are still a few PolyGerrit related items.

Topics for the upcoming hackathon

Luca suggested that we make a list of topics for the upcoming hackathon. He also suggested that, like the hackathon in Sweden, regular contributors should donate some of their time to help new contributors get up to speed.

David pointed out that some of the maintainers’ time will be decidated to stabilizing and finalizing the 3.1 release during the week.

Remove the internal gitweb servlet

Following on from the last meeting’s discussion of repository browsing, David suggested that we remove the internal gitweb servlet and focus on improving the integration with the gitiles plugin which is now a core plugin. Everyone agreed that this is a good idea, but we should postpone it until after the 3.1 release.

Roadmap

There was no further discussion about the Gerrit roadmap. Alice has set a separate meeting for 22nd October.

Review of issues on the ESC component

We briefly went over the issues that have been added to the ESC component on the issue tracker and did not find any that need urgent attention.