ESC meeting notes of the 5th of May 2020
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+---
+title: "Gerrit ESC Meeting Minutes"
+tags: esc
+keywords: esc minutes
+permalink: 2020-05-07-esc-minutes.html
+summary: "Minutes from the ESC meeting held on May 5th"
+hide_sidebar: true
+hide_navtoggle: true
+toc: true
+---
+
+## Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, May 5, 2020
+
+### Attendees
+
+David Pursehouse, Ben Rohlfs, Alice Kober-Sotzek, Patrick Hiesel, Luca Milanesio
+
+### Place/Date/Duration
+
+Online, May 5, 12:30 - 13:30 CEST
+
+The ESC meetings will take place once a month from now on.
+
+### Next meeting
+
+The next meeting will be held on June 2, 09:30 CEST.
+
+## Minutes
+
+### Additional lint checks in CI
+
+With regards to the support of the latest version of error prone, David Ostrovsky made some
+work and progressed the activity. Currently waiting for the Bazel Team to review and accept
+his [GitHub PR #11271](https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/pull/11271).
+
+
+### Reviewers promotion as Gerrit core plugin
+
+Sven Selberg is taking some of the work to adress the issues raised on the reviewers plugin
+to make it suitable for promotion.
+From a popularity perspective, the reviewers plugin is already the most used plugin
+of its type, amongst the general shortlist of the top 100 plugins for Gerrit.
+
+### Gerrit v3.2 release
+
+There is a continuous progress on the features in development for v3.2.
+
+The [multi-master scalability of the replication plugin](https://www.gerritcodereview.com/design-docs/scaling-multi-master-replication.html)
+is close to completion. There is a concern on the test coverage and real-life production
+use of the functionality. It will be flagged as experimental because of lack of production use
+and feedback.
+
+The support for global ref-db in the high-availability plugin has been agreed with Marco Miller:
+the implementation will be done on the high-availability plugin master branch and, if finished on time,
+released at the same time as Gerrit v3.2 but flagged as experimental.
+
+Ben Rohlfs agreed to start validating PolyGerrit in v3.2 and master using Chrome 80. Existing stable
+releases will be continued to be validated against the older version of Chrome, because of the issues
+found with WCT tests on Chrome 80. A specific note will be included in the release notes.
+
+### Next joint meeting ESC and CM
+
+Marco Miller has agreed to organize a remote joint meeting between the ESC and CM, because of the
+cancellation of the Spring 2020 hackathon due to COVID-19.
+
+### Introduction of Quality Gates in the contribution process
+
+Luca Milanesio raised the issue that some changes merged in the past have created issues in released
+version of Gerrit. We do not currently document or enforce a quality gate for reviewing and approving
+changes.
+
+Ben Rohlfs pointed out that we have already a quality criteria to nominate maintainers and we assume they
+are good enough for the job of reviewing and approving changes. A further complication in the process
+is not needed.
+
+There is consensus on Ben's position: the current contribution process will remain as it is today.
+
+### Review of open design documents
+
+* [Instance ID / name propagation in events](https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/c/homepage/+/257972)
+
+ The design has been analyzed by Patrick Hiesel and provided a positive feedback
+ to move forward, as long as the instance-id is optional and not required / populated for single-master
+ setups. There are no objections to the decision: the design is approved.
+
+
+### Review of issues on the ESC component
+
+* [Issue 10126 - A better way to prevent spam, or report spammers](http://bugs.chromium.org/p/gerrit/issues/detail?id=10126)
+
+ A few months ago, gerrit-review introduced a group for adding accounts that have restricted permissions.
+ David Pursehouse raised the issue that having restricted permissions is not enough as the spammers
+ would still be able to login and operate on gerrit-review.
+
+ Patrick Hiesel proposed to disable the spammers' accounts with a REST-API
+ authorized to the Gerrit maintainers and Ben Rohlfs proposed to add button on the Gerrit
+ UI should a suitable API be available in the backend.
+
+* [Issue 11632 - Schedule of the ESC/CM joint meeting](http://bugs.chromium.org/p/gerrit/issues/detail?id=11632)
+
+ It was supposed to happen during the next forthcoming Gerrit Hackathon in
+ April/May 2020, now cancelled because of Covid-19. A follow-up discussion
+ needs to happen with the CMs to understand how this can be
+ coordinated remotely with all the different time-zones to cover.
+
+There were no other issues that have updates or require attention.
+
+
