| --- |
| title: "Gerrit ESC Meeting Minutes" |
| tags: esc |
| keywords: esc minutes |
| permalink: 2019-10-29-esc-minutes.html |
| summary: "Minutes from the ESC meeting held on October 29th" |
| hide_sidebar: true |
| hide_navtoggle: true |
| toc: true |
| --- |
| |
| ## Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, October 29, 2019 |
| |
| ### Attendees |
| |
| David Pursehouse, Luca Milanesio, Patrick Hiesel, Alice Kober-Sotzek |
| |
| ### Place/Date/Duration |
| |
| Online, October 29, 12:30 - 13:20 CEST |
| |
| ### Next meeting |
| |
| Per the biweekly schedule the next meeting should be held on November 12, but |
| we will skip it due to conflict with the Gerrit Hackathon. |
| |
| The next meeting will be held on November 26, 12:30 CEST. |
| |
| ## Minutes |
| |
| ### Gerrit News Page |
| |
| The next issue of the project news is due to be published on November 29. |
| |
| There were no new items proposed during this meeting. Luca will write a |
| separate post about the live streaming of the upcoming user summit. |
| |
| Members of the community may propose items by adding a change on the |
| [draft post](https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/c/homepage/+/239186). |
| |
| ### Gerrit Roadmap |
| |
| A separate meeting was held last week to discuss the contents of the |
| roadmap and how to manage it. Luca was not able to attend, so we went |
| over the discussion again today. |
| |
| * The roadmap will be hosted on the project homepage on a dedicated |
| page. Alice will upload a change to add the initial version. The initial |
| version of the roadmap will then be announced in a news post and on the |
| project mailing list. |
| |
| * We will not include version 3.1 in the roadmap because it is going |
| to be released in a couple of weeks. The initial roadmap will include |
| 3.2 and "future releases". |
| |
| * The roadmap is not a "wish list". This means that features on the |
| roadmap will only be those that have a commitment from an owner who |
| will drive it to be implemented for the corresponding release. |
| |
| * We will have a standing agenda item to review the roadmap in the |
| biweekly ESC meeting, to ensure that features are still on track to be |
| completed in the expected release, and amend it if necessary. Updates to |
| the roadmap will be mentioned in the ESC meeting minutes. |
| |
| * Community members may propose to add features to the roadmap either |
| by contacting the ESC or uploading a change to the homepage project. |
| |
| We also briefly discussed the idea of having an "open roadmap" |
| like [Tuleap](https://blog.tuleap.org/open-roadmap-day-where-the-future-of-tuleap-is-shaped). |
| This is not something that we will do now, but will potentially |
| discuss again in future. |
| |
| ### Status and metrics for gerrit-review.googlesource.com |
| |
| Patrick followed up on the discussion from the previous meeting |
| and reported that Google expects to work on this in 2020, however |
| there is no concrete plan yet. |
| |
| ### Hackathon and User Summit planning |
| |
| We discussed scheduling of future user summits and agreed that we want |
| to have a clearer roadmap for them. |
| |
| Luca asked if Google is willing to host a summit in the USA next year, |
| and if it would be feasible to collocate with the BazelCon. Patrick will |
| look into this. |
| |
| We also dicussed whether or not we should continue with summits in Europe |
| given the low attendance of the recent one in Gothenburg. Luca suggested |
| that we could drop the European summit and rely on live streaming of the |
| USA summit. Patrick also pointed out that the Gothenburg summit and the |
| upcoming summit in Sunnyvale both have almost the same content, so maybe |
| it doesn't make sense to have two. |
| |
| David mentioned that there may be a lot of users in China and APAC, based |
| on mails to the discussion list, so it might be worth considering a summit |
| and/or hackathon in Asia. We are unsure what level of interest there would |
| be, nor whether there is anyone who would be able/willing to host it. |
| |
| ### Gerrit narratives |
| |
| Over the past months, Han-Wen has been trying to put together a narrative |
| for Gerrit at Google, i.e. a question & answer document that explains what |
| the team is doing, how they fit into the organization, and where they are |
| going. Some of the questions and answers are not really about Google at |
| all, and are things that we should rather document in upstream Gerrit. Some |
| of it is part of the docs, but we should also have a pitch selling the |
| product and the community on our website, for example: |
| |
| - What is the value of code review? |
| - What is the origin of Gerrit? |
| - Why is Gerrit open source? |
| - What is the Gerrit workflow? |
| - Why use Gerrit instead of other systems? |
| - etc |
| |
| David pointed out that there have been several issues related to this raised |
| against the homepage. See |
| [issue 11390](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/gerrit/issues/detail?id=11390), |
| [issue 11778](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/gerrit/issues/detail?id=11778), and |
| [issue 11779](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/gerrit/issues/detail?id=11779). |
| |
| We agreed that we should improve the homepage to better "sell" Gerrit to |
| potential users. We will add this on the agenda for the next ESC and Community |
| Managers meeting. |
| |
| ### Review of open design proposals |
| |
| There are several design proposals under review. We looked over the list and |
| confirmed that they all have someone from ESC involved, so no action is needed. |
| |
| We decided that rejected designs should not be published on the designs |
| section of the homepage, but rather should be abandoned. The homepage already |
| has a link to query the abandoned designs on gerrit-review. |
| |
| ### Review of issues on the ESC component |
| |
| We briefly went over the issues that have been added to the |
| [ESC component](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/gerrit/issues/list?q=component=ESC) |
| on the issue tracker and did not find any that need urgent attention. |