Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, December 10, 2019

Attendees

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

Place/Date/Duration

Online, December 10, 12:30 - 13:30 CEST

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on January 21, 12:30 CEST.

Minutes

Gerrit News Page

The next issue of the project news is due to be published at the end of January next year. No news items were proposed during the meeting.

Planning for next bugfix releases

There are no pending fixes for 2.16.14 and 3.0.5 and the release notes are already almost up-to-date. For 3.1.1 there is still one change pending, and it’s expected to be submitted soon.

David will take care of releasing 3.0.5 and 3.1.1; Luca will release 2.16.14.

Review of open design documents

  • Threaded change log:

    Patrick has requested some updates related to replying to multiple messages. David will follow up with Jacek, the author.

  • Pluggable authentication backend:

    Edwin reviewed the documents and provided feedback. Jacek has addressed the feedback and now we’re waiting for a follow-up review.

Initial results from Hackathon and User Summit survey

Luca gave a brief overview of the results so far from the Hackathon and User Summit Survey. Feedback is good, but there is still room for improvement. The problems raised were pretty well aligned with what we had already identified in the previous ESC meeting:

  • Too many admins and not enough users
  • Cramped room
  • Prefer to meet during the week rather than the weekend
  • Too close to the Thanksgiving holiday period

Also, the proposal to have a workshop for regular users received positive feedback.

Use Swagger for the Gerrit REST API

Issue 40011133 suggests to use Swagger, which will allow generate REST API documentation and stubs for clients.

We decided not to make a decision on this right now, but look into it some more on open standards like OpenAPI (Swagger is just one implementation of the standard) and come up with a plan.

Gerrit Roadmap

The initial version of the roadmap was published and is now available on the homepage.

During the review there were suggestions about how to keep the roadmap up to date, i.e. with links to changes, design docs, issues, etc.

We discussed this and decided to continue with the current format. It will be a lot of effort to keep it up to date in such detail.

Critical User Journeys

The UX team at Google wants to define Critical User Journeys (CUJs) - a written down status quo of how users use Gerrit and the important workflows.

We didn’t discuss this in detail, but put an action point for everyone to think about it and provide feedback for the next meeting.

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.

  • Issue 40011666 - Publishing plugin artifacts to Maven Central:

    This was requested for the checks plugin.

    Using separate group Ids is probably not feasible due the bureaucratic overhead required to manage them via Sonatype.

    Using the existing group Ids is also not feasible because granting permission would also allow people to publish core Gerrit artifacts.

    Maybe it will be enough to use the maven repository on the Google Storage Bucket?

    Luca will look into this some more.

  • Issue 40011458 - Clarify future of change identifiers:

    Patrick confirmed that this did not get discussed during the user summit.