Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, Sep 7, 2021

Attendees

Han-Wen Nienhuys, Luca Milanesio, Saša Živkov

Place/Date/Duration

Online, Sep 9, 11:15 - 12:00 CET

Next meeting

TBD

Minutes

Action items

Google has published quarterly objectives for Q3.

Virtual summit Dec 2-3

Recent events were contributor/developer summits, so there were no user summits for 2 years. GerritForge would like to organize a user-event. As the pandemic isn’t under control yet, a face-to-face event is unlikely.

A user-event attracts more participants, so will need infrastructure beyond Google meet. GerritForge can hire an external company.

GerritForge considered a f2f hackathon in London in December, but it looks impossible. (Both Google and SAP have WFH policies. We cannot and don’t want to send people to a f2f event.)

This means we should do the release of Gerrit 3.5 in November.

Case sensitive usernames

Our survey is closing tomorrow, but we have 5 responses from companies who have users just distinguished by case. So we cannot remove the support completely, and must go ahead with the current solution (make it configurable). This will be submitted to master shortly. The new default is case-insensitive.

Java 11

Google has moved to Java 11 as of Aug 31. Gerrit can move to Java 11 for current master. Stable releases remain on Java 8. We merge forward from stable, so the difference in language level should cause no problems.

Moving drafts out of the change index

Han-Wen: Google is moving has:draft out of the change index. The new solution does a prefix ref scan. Google would love to see real-life data if this prohibitively expensive for upstream deployments; we could change the draft storage in response (refs/users/USERID/drafts/CHANGEID iso. refs/drafts/CHANGEID/USERID).

Luca: we support reducing the amount of indexing. All-Users gets a lot of traffic and Jacek Centkowski is looking into it; he can provide timings.

If it is expensive, could we change the storage in a dual-read mode (read old+new storage format, write new format) to provide a seamless upgrade path for 3.4 to 3.5.

Classical replication and bitmaps

Saša: SAP will post findings for the classical replication plugin. We have a scenario where disabling bitmaps decreases replication times (for push replication).

Han-Wen: that’s odd. Try JGit bitmaps iso. CGit bitmaps maybe? We tweaked bitmap generation for our deployment. Will forward to the JGit team at Google.