_posts/2020-12-01-esc-minutes.md - homepage - Git at Google

 ---
 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.
	---
	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.