Engineering Steering Committee Meetings, January 29, 2025

Participants: Edwin Kempin [EK], Luca Milanesio [LM], Saša Zivkov [SZ]

Next meeting: Feburary 26, 2025

Monthly Catch-up Meetings

The team agreed to reinstate the monthly catch-up meetings, which will now take place on the last Wednesday of every month at 2 PM CET. This schedule aims to ensure regular alignment and discussions on key topics, with the flexibility of reducing the meetings’ duration in case the agenda is minimal.

Welcoming Edwin Back to ESC

A warm welcome to Edwin [EK] to the ESC who will communicate this update, and him leaving the role of Community Manager.

[EK] replaces Chris Poucet and Patrick Hiesel’s roles as Google members of the ESC.

How to better prevent Google build failures from Community Contributions

[LM] raised the point on how to improve the stability of Community Contributions, particularly concerning the update of features not used by Google, including the Lucene and SSH protocol support.

Ensuring that Gerrit-CI builds do not break Google’s build remains a challenge, as the current build still includes Lucene and SSH. [LM] will investigate if it is possible to define an extra build target and verification that would try to identify possible breakages or build failures when Lucene and SSH are completely taken out of the picture.

For reference, the issue of Lucene document metrics was discussed in connection with Alvaro’s Lucene documents metrics which introduced an implicit dependency on the use of Lucene as Gerrit search and indexing backend.

Gerrit 2025 roadmap at the GerritMeets on the 19th of February 2025

The upcoming GerritMeets event on the 19th of February was discussed, with a focus on securing volunteers to present the roadmap for 2025 and beyond. There is an opportunity to showcase key plans for the future of Gerrit, and [SZ] will check internally whether anything related to k8s-gerrit could be presented at the event.

Use of Git refs to store the diff-cache instead of the H2 backend

[SZ] proposed the use of a diff cache directly in the repository instead of keeping it in the H2 persistence backend. That would allow to easily distribute and replicate that cache using the standard Git replication and also making sure that it scales up seamlessly with the repository.

Both [EK] and [LM] agreed that this could be a beneficial approach, with [LM] emphasizing that it would also help address the issue of excessively large H2 tables, which have become a bottleneck. While there is no firm commitment yet, [SZ] suggested that this change could potentially be included in Gerrit v3.12.

Review of Open Design Proposals

The team also reviewed the Dynamic Submit-Type feature request, which was triggered by discussions surrounding the removal of Prolog rules. Given the potential impact of this change, it was agreed that [SZ] would review the design document and provide feedback at the next meeting.