Publish notes for ESC meeting Dec 1
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+---
+title: "Gerrit ESC Meeting Minutes"
+tags: esc
+keywords: esc minutes
+permalink: 2020-12-01-esc-minutes.html
+summary: "Minutes from the ESC meeting held on December 1st"
+hide_sidebar: true
+hide_navtoggle: true
+toc: true
+---
+
+## Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, December 1, 2020
+
+### Attendees
+
+Ben Rohlfs, Han-Wen Nienhuys, Patrick Hiesel, Luca Milanesio, Saša Zivkov
+
+### Place/Date/Duration
+
+Online, December 1, 11:00 - 12:30 CET
+
+### Next meeting
+
+The next meeting will be held on January 5, 11:00 CEST.
+
+## Minutes
+
+### New community maintainer nomination
+
+Luca nominated a new community maintainer and the ESC discussed and supports
+the nomination. Luca will send an email to the maintainer mailing list following
+the official process for nomination.
+
+### Reworking the events system
+
+Han-Wen brought up that Google is doing some internal work in Q1 around
+dispatching events (specifically using Cloud PubSub for googlesource.com hosts).
+
+Some of this work might be applicable to open-source as well and built in core.
+Mostly, this includes the idea to build a component that can generate events
+based off of ChangeNotes and two SHA1s by diffing the state between the two
+SHA1s and emitting events for all actions that happened in between.
+
+Luca expressed interest to collaborate on a larger rewrite of the upstream events
+system and the aforementioned component and Marcin Czech will engage with him in
+the exercise.
+
+Saša asked if this work would also enable open-source instances to be hooked up
+with Google Cloud PubSub. Han-Wen and Patrick stated that this is possible, but
+would require a bit of glue code in a Gerrit plugin to call Cloud PubSub APIs.
+
+### Triaging issues (follow up to Issue 11170, contributor summit)
+
+The ESC discussed if and under what SLA bugs in the project's public issue tracker
+are triaged. The Gerrit Frontend team at Google tries to look at frontend bugs as
+part of their triage, the backend team at Google only looks at issues labeled with
+googlesource.com indicating that the issue can be reproduced on googlesource.com.
+
+GerritForge does the same with issues related to GerritHub.io and on non-EOL
+branches on a best-effort basis for the whole community.
+
+The ESCs consensus on this topic is that triage and fixing of issues is done
+best-effort. If contributors (both individuals and companies) require a guaranteed
+SLA and on EOL releases, they can either dedicate resources (i.e. contributors to
+triage and fix issues) or sign a support contract with a company offering
+consulting (such as GerritForge).
+
+### Retrospective: 3.3. Release
+
+Luca led a short retrospective to hear how the release went and what can be improved.
+Overall, everyone was very happy with how it went and appreciative of the work that
+the release managers (Luca and Marco) did.
+
+Ben said that the frontend could have been more proactive with merging Typescript changes
+faster and getting in attention set earlier.
+
+Saša thought that there were quite some discussions going on which looked like more churn
+than usually. Han-Wen and Patrick said that it looks like this was caused by JGit issues.
+
+There could overall be better tests, especially for longer running JGit operations.
+Luca will engage with Matthias for a more systematic E2E test of JGit master changes
+with Gerrit on a regular basis.
+
+### API Object migration (POJO -> Proto)
+
+Patrick discussed moving from Plain Old Java Objects (POJO) in the API definitions to
+using Protocol Buffers (Protos). We already use Protos in different parts in Gerrit
+(e.g. caches).
+
+This has the benefit that objects are immutable (especially interesting to the events
+system) and can be reused client side to implement REST API clients in any language
+without duplicating definitions.
+
+Ben said that the frontend would welcome this move.
+
+The consensus was that we move forward with that migration. Since it's under the hood,
+no design doc is required.
+
+### Open Designs
+
+James Blair has a design open for the checks plugin. Ben has a tentative plan to hook
+up the checks plugin with the new CI plugin interface. James is welcome to continue
+working on the checks plugin, but this work doesn't require a design doc.
+
+Luca hopes that the work on the pluggable auth backend gets picked up soon by Jacek
+or anyone else from Digital.ai.
+
+### Roadmap
+
+The ESC went over the internal roadmap doc once more and will update the public roadmap
+soon.
+
+### Open issues
+
+Han-Wen will write a post on the homepage explaining how Google does triage of upstream
+issues and Luca will do the same for GerritForge.
+
+
+
