| --- |
| title: "Gerrit ESC Meeting Minutes" |
| tags: esc |
| keywords: esc minutes |
| permalink: 2021-03-09-esc-minutes.html |
| summary: "Minutes from the ESC meeting held on Mar 9, 2021" |
| hide_sidebar: true |
| hide_navtoggle: true |
| toc: true |
| --- |
| |
| ## Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, Mar 9, 2021 |
| |
| ### Attendees |
| |
| Ben Rohlfs, Han-Wen Nienhuys, Luca Milanesio, Patrick Hiesel, Saša Živkov |
| |
| ### Place/Date/Duration |
| |
| Online, Mar 9, 11:00 - 12:00 CET |
| |
| ### Next meeting |
| |
| Apr 06, 2021 - 11:00 - 12:00 CET |
| |
| ## Minutes |
| |
| ### Gerrit events rewrite and GCloud pub/sub notifications |
| |
| Han-Wen has proposed [Change-Id: Ia54acb37](https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/c/gerrit/+/296326) |
| which represents the beginning of the initiative of having Gerrit |
| events available over the REST API. The |
| [previous design in review posted by Alice](https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/c/homepage/+/280925) |
| has been abandoned because largely outdated compared to the current |
| status on Gerrit master. |
| |
| Luca and GerritForge will drive a redesign targeting Gerrit v3.5. |
| |
| ### Patch-set comment experiment in Gerrit v3.3 |
| |
| The [patch-set level comment](https://www.gerritcodereview.com/3.3.html#new-features) |
| introduced in Gerrit v3.3 as an experiment could become an official |
| features in v3.4. |
| |
| Luca proposed [Change-Id: I57569fb](https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/c/gerrit/+/291225) |
| for exposing the additional messages to stream events, so that CI systems can |
| leverage it. Once the change is merged, both Zuul and Jenkins integrations |
| would need to consume the new information. |
| |
| ### ElasticSearch moved to SSPL |
| |
| ElasticSearch moved releases to SSPL starting 7.11. Google is opposed |
| to SSPL software on principle. SAP also forbids it. |
| |
| Context [from the ESC in Feb](2021-02-02-esc-minutes.html): |
| index support started with Lucene and Solr. Solr was clunky, |
| so collabnet and ericsson worked to move to Elastic, but neither |
| deployed. Alibaba seems to be using it. |
| |
| Decision made by the ESC is to freeze the version for now. |
| Han-Wen has reached out Jacek and Marco and it looks like neither of them |
| have interest in maintaining it. |
| |
| Luca will announce the decision to drop the ES support in core, asking |
| for feedback on the consequences (if any?) on the current Gerrit users. |
| |
| ### Design docs vs code guideline/process |
| |
| Qualcomm requested to have more clarity on when a design document is |
| required vs. just submitting the proposal a working code in a Gerrit |
| change for review. |
| |
| In the past the community was a lot smaller and Shawn was overseeing |
| the whole code-base and could have given a lot of guidance without |
| the need of a lot of input from other contributors. |
| |
| There is a general consensus though that a short-track of posting |
| a change with a meaningful commit message could still be good enough |
| when: |
| |
| - the change is small and has a limited impact on Gerrit functionality |
| - introduces a clear and limited functionality |
| - enables a trivial use-case without edge cases |
| - the use case suggests a simple, single solution |
| |
| For all other cases, a design document is still the most valid |
| approach to trigger the exchange of ideas around the new feature. |
| |
| ### Status of the Gerrit CI pipeline changes |
| |
| The adoption of [Zuul](https://zuul-ci.org/) continues and the next |
| step will be the validation of Gerrit changes. Once that is completed, |
| Zuul can then move into the next steps of: |
| - Supporting builds on RBE |
| - Supporting Docker-container based tests |
| |
| The current [Jenkins-based CI pipeline](https://gerrit-ci.gerritforge.com) will |
| still be needed though for all the other builds not related to incoming |
| changes: |
| - plugins stable builds |
| - E2E tests |
| - Other libraries |
| |
| ### Spring cleaning of Gerrit REST-API |
| |
| The front-end team is tracking which Gerrit API are unused and is |
| planning to remove them on master, which will become Gerrit v3.4: |
| |
| - Drop of Polymer2 cruft |
| - Removal of *some* of 50 different API methods |
| |
| The initiative is guided by data observed on `*.googlesource.com` |
| and a list of proposed dropped API will be also posted to repo-discuss. |
| |
| ### Decommission of JSch on Gerrit master |
| |
| David has driven the initiative of [moving away from JSch](https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/c/gerrit/+/269976) |
| and adopting instead Mina SSH client. |
| |
| Han-Wen has already reviewed and provided the green light, Patrick is now |
| reviewing the change and finalising the merge. |
| |
| ### Release plan for Gerrit v3.4 |
| |
| David has proposed the [Gerrit v3.4 release plan](https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/c/homepage/+/298876) |
| targeting a release date of May 17. The plan looks good and has been approved. |
| |
| There is a general agreement that we should continue to target Java 11 as a runtime, |
| keeping the ability to be able to build the code from source on Java 8 as well. |
| |
| Saša expressed the concern that in Gerrit v3.3 some plugins (e.g. high-availability) |
| may not be able to compile on Java 8 because of Java 11-only dependencies. |
| Luca has fixed the issue with the high-availability plugin (global refdb with |
| java8 classifier) but raised the concern that we cannot force all plugins' developers |
| to respect that norm. |
| |
| There is a consensus that core plugins will continue to be compatible with Java 8 |
| at source level, with the recommendation (but not requirement) to do the same for |
| the other plugins. |
| |
| ### Gerrit v3.3 and double-release on Java 8 |
| |
| Luca presented the data about the adoption of Java 11 on the latest versions of |
| Gerrit: |
| |
| - Gerrit v3.3 JVM statistics: 3399 setups (up to 3rd Feb 2021) |
| * Java 11 (96.3%) |
| * other (3.6%) |
| * Java 8 (0.1%) |
| - Gerrit v3.2 JVM statistics: 5915 setups (up to 3rd Feb 2021) |
| * Java 11 (57.2%) |
| * Java 8 (41.6%) |
| * other (1.2%) |
| |
| Saša mentioned the need for SAP to keep on having the source code to compile |
| on Java 8, but not necessarily the requirement to have Java 8 distribution or |
| binaries except that the referenced libraries should also to be Java 8 compatible |
| or should be able to be recompiled with Java 8. |
| |
| The consensus is to keep the current policy of releasing only on Java 11 to keep |
| the current adoption rate. |
| |
| ### New features on EOL branches |
| |
| Following the [Change-Id: Ifebae17f](https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/c/gerrit/+/298880) |
| proposed by Luca, Han-Wen proposed to make the policy even more restrictive and |
| ban the introduction of new features in any stable branch. |
| |
| That should also include 3rd party dependencies (either Google or non-Google ones) unless |
| they are required to address critical and security bugs. |
| |
| There is a general consensus that brand-new features should be introduced only on master and, |
| if needed cherry-picked on a un-maintained private fork should anyone needed on an earlier |
| stable branch. |
| |
| ### Roadmap updates |
| |
| - Protobuf in Gerrit events: Google won't be able to finalize this in time for v3.4. |
| Background: the introduction was mainly delayed by qcom wanting more justification |
| for this migration but also b/c we needed to prototype all field types that |
| we have to make sure they translate well. |
| Note that the protobuf events is obviated with our notification strategy. |
| Google still has an intent to move the API types (`*Info`, `*Input`) to protobuf. |
| - Luca added to v3.4 the introduction of additional cloud-native events-brokers: |
| GCloud PubSub and/or AWS Kinesis. |
| - Saša mentioned that it would be nice to have a redesign/rewirte of the replication plugin |
| code somewhere in the future, even though SAP is planning to switch to pull-replication |
| which would leverage Git protocol v2. |
