Today the fourth meeting of the Engineering Steering Committee took place. This post contains a short summary of the topics that were covered.
Luca Milanesio, David Pursehouse, Alice Kober-Sotzek, Ben Rohlfs
Online, June 25, 12:30 - 13:15 CEST
The next meeting will be held on July 19, 12:30 CEST.
There is only one change still pending. The other issues in the tracker were closed.
The next Gerrit User Summits dates and schedule are now published. Google, GerritForge, and CollabNet are planning to send representatives to one or both events. More talks details are going to be published in the next few days, and slots for new talks are still available on the Sunnyvale event.
The recent releases of JGit, starting from 5.1.8, are experiencing problems related to the racy reads of the Git repository files, which impacts the normal Gerrit operations. The JGit and Gerrit maintainers are aware of them and are working hard to get them identified and fixed. In the meantime, Gerrit will stay on the latest stable JGit versions which are not impacted by the racy read problem.
Gerrit v2.13 has not been supported by the community for a few months and it is now going also be removed from the Gerrit CI. That means that all existing builds artifacts are going to be archived and Gerrit CI can drop the support for Gerrit v2.13 and associated plugin builds. This would allow to remove the support for the Buck-based builds and save a lot of space in the Docker build images.
The current security on Gerrit CI is going to be upgraded to use X.509 Client certificates instead of the current GitHub OAuth authentication. The existing Jenkins instance will remain read-only for public unauthenticated access whilst the Gerrit maintainers will be provided with a client authentication certificate to install on their Web Browsers.
There hasn‘t been any feedback on David’s proposal to publish a regular news post on the project website. The draft for a post at the end of June is there, but has no content yet.
David will try to get the ball rolling with a brief update on recent activity in the project.
Polymer 2 support is currently available on gerrit-review.googlesource.com and accessible by adding the ?p2 URL parameter.
Any Polymer 2 specific issues can be reported on the Gerrit Issue Tracker using the Polymer2 hotlist.
People started adopting Polymer 2 and reporting some initial feedback and fixes. Everyone is invited to try it out and report any issue. Similarly, plugins need to be checked for Polymer 2 compatibility and fixed if needed.
The current version of Gitiles needs to be fixed and a stable branch created to address one recent regression. See change 227998.
More generally the Gitiles project, that has historically had linear development on the master branch, needs to be branched and released more consistently with the Gerrit semantic versioning.
It was agreed that the current bi-weekly meeting frequency is sufficient for now, and the next meeting will be in 2 weeks as usual. If we feel that we need a longer gap, i.e. during the summer holiday season, we will decide that on an ad-hoc basis.