Luca Milanesio | 31be0eb | 2021-01-14 19:24:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1 | --- |
| 2 | title: "Gerrit ESC Meeting Minutes" |
| 3 | tags: esc |
| 4 | keywords: esc minutes |
| 5 | permalink: 2021-01-15-esc-minutes.html |
| 6 | summary: "Minutes from the ESC meeting held on January 12th" |
| 7 | hide_sidebar: true |
| 8 | hide_navtoggle: true |
| 9 | toc: true |
| 10 | --- |
| 11 | |
| 12 | ## Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, January 12, 2021 |
| 13 | |
| 14 | ### Attendees |
| 15 | |
| 16 | Ben Rohlfs, Han-Wen Nienhuys, Patrick Hiesel, Luca Milanesio, Saša Zivkov |
| 17 | |
| 18 | ### Place/Date/Duration |
| 19 | |
| 20 | Online, January 12, 11:00 - 11:45 CET |
| 21 | |
| 22 | ### Next meeting |
| 23 | |
| 24 | The next meeting will be held on February 2, 11:00 CEST. |
| 25 | |
| 26 | ## Minutes |
| 27 | |
| 28 | ### Gerrit long-term stable releases (LTS) |
| 29 | |
| 30 | Should the Gerrit project start keeping long-term support branches for one or |
| 31 | more releases of Gerrit? The current [EOL policy](https://www.gerritcodereview.com/support.html#supported-versions) |
| 32 | defines an 18 months (3 releases) lifetime. Gerrit v2.16, released back in |
| 33 | November 2018, represents an exception and will be kept for longer to allow |
| 34 | existing pre-2.16 installations to migrate to Gerrit v3.x and beyond. |
| 35 | |
| 36 | The proposal to an extended support cycle for some elected LTS releases has been |
| 37 | unanimously rejected for the following reasons: |
| 38 | |
| 39 | - The LTS branch would need strong governance on what can and cannot be added. The code-base |
| 40 | could diverge from the mainstream development and eventually become a _de-facto_ fork of Gerrit. |
| 41 | |
| 42 | - Web-browsers may not have an LTS support policy aligned with Gerrit, causing compatibility |
| 43 | issues and additional hurdles to support browser upgrades. E.g. Firefox Enterprise Edition support |
| 44 | is limited to 1 year. |
| 45 | |
| 46 | - The Gerrit Community focuses on helping to migrate to more recent and modern releases, such as v3.3 |
| 47 | with attention-set. Having an LTS release for 5-10 years would give further incentive |
| 48 | for companies to shelf current upgrade plans. |
| 49 | |
| 50 | - Older versions of Gerrit have more issues with rough edges on the user experience, which people see |
| 51 | and use to judge the product. Having more obsolete LTS versions of |
| 52 | Gerrit around would bring even more bad PR to the product itself. |
| 53 | |
| 54 | ### Zuul for gerrit itself |
| 55 | |
| 56 | The Gerrit Code Review project has started adopting [Zuul](https://zuul-ci.org/) from 2019/2020 and |
| 57 | it is now used for the build of a large number of plugins on the [Gerrit Zuul CI instance](https://ci.gerritforge.com). |
| 58 | |
| 59 | Han-Wen proposed to extend the adoption of Zuul to the CI of Gerrit itself. |
| 60 | There is consensus to proceed, assuming that Zuul has bridged the gap for supporting Docker-based |
| 61 | build agents, instead of GCloud VMs. Luca will follow up with James (Zuul maintainer) to check |
| 62 | the status and plan the next steps. |
| 63 | |
| 64 | ### Status of dropping Java 8 support for Gerrit |
| 65 | |
| 66 | Google is planning to move to Java 11 in H2/2021, allowing to drop the support for Java 8 build |
| 67 | validation on Gerrit master. The target release for dropping Java 8 is therefore Gerrit v3.5, while |
| 68 | Gerrit v3.4 will continue to support Java 8 compilation. |
| 69 | |
| 70 | ### What's cooking in GerritForge for 2021 |
| 71 | |
| 72 | Luca shared the [GerritForge’s shopping list for 2021](https://gitenterprise.me/2021/01/04/2021-whats-cooking-in-gerritforge/) |
| 73 | which contains: |
| 74 | |
| 75 | - The support for cloud-native events-brokers: Google's GCloud Pub/Sub and AWS Kinesis streams |
| 76 | - Proto-buffers for representing events for Gerrit v3.4 |
| 77 | - Further improvements in the pull-replication plugin |
| 78 | - Integration of Jenkins with the new CI reboot in Gerrit v3.4 |
| 79 | |
| 80 | ### Policies for PolyGerrit dependencies up-to-date |
| 81 | |
| 82 | Gerrit Code Review code-base is mirrored on the [GerritCodeReview project in GitHub](https://github.com/gerritcodereview) |
| 83 | which automates the [Dependabots's security checks and warnings](https://dependabot.com/). |
| 84 | |
| 85 | Ben will be also added to the list of GitHub project's owners so that the PolyGerrit Team can |
| 86 | receive and assess all the feedback provided by Dependabot. |
| 87 | |
| 88 | ### Top #3 PolyGerrit-related show-stoppers vs. GWT UI |
| 89 | |
| 90 | GerritForge has performed a survey with its clients to identify the top #3 problems |
| 91 | that companies have indicated as show-stoppers for migrating to PolyGerrit in Gerrit v2.16 |
| 92 | and beyond. |
| 93 | |
Edwin Kempin | d3b0ab1 | 2023-06-20 08:02:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 94 | 1. [Issue 40012178](https://issues.gerritcodereview.com/issues/40012178): Horizontal spacing usage |
Luca Milanesio | 31be0eb | 2021-01-14 19:24:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 95 | |
Edwin Kempin | d3b0ab1 | 2023-06-20 08:02:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 96 | 2. [Issue 40013256](https://issues.gerritcodereview.com/issues/40013256): Lack of CSS customisation |
Luca Milanesio | 31be0eb | 2021-01-14 19:24:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 97 | |
Edwin Kempin | d3b0ab1 | 2023-06-20 08:02:45 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 98 | 3. [Issue 40011499](https://issues.gerritcodereview.com/issues/40011499): Gap in browsers support |
Luca Milanesio | 31be0eb | 2021-01-14 19:24:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 99 | |
| 100 | There is positive attitude for discussing those issues with Ben and the PolyGerrit Team and |
| 101 | find possible solutions. GerritForge has offered its development Team to cooperate with the |
| 102 | development and fix of the above issues, with the agreement of the rest of the community. |
| 103 | |
| 104 | ### Eclipse moving away from Gerrit |
| 105 | |
| 106 | The Eclipse system administrator has announced the intention to move away from Gerrit. |
| 107 | Matthias described the current situation for at least JGit/EGit projects and the intention |
| 108 | to keep Gerrit as code-review system for the projects. |
| 109 | |
| 110 | The discussion inside the Eclipse foundation continues, there are no actions for the ESC |
| 111 | at this point in time. |