| --- |
| title: "Gerrit ESC Meeting Minutes" |
| tags: esc |
| keywords: esc minutes |
| permalink: 2021-06-01-esc-minutes.html |
| summary: "Minutes from the ESC meeting held on June 1, 2021" |
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| toc: true |
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| ## Engineering Steering Committee Meeting, June 1, 2021 |
| |
| ### Attendees |
| |
| Han-Wen Nienhuys, Luca Milanesio, Patrick Hiesel, Saša Živkov |
| |
| ### Place/Date/Duration |
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| Online, June 1, 11:00 - 12:00 CET |
| |
| ### Next meeting |
| |
| Jul 6, 2021 - 11:00 - 12:00 CET |
| |
| ## Minutes |
| |
| ### Moving to use `main` branch name for the Gerrit repository |
| |
| `master` is a term that we do not use anymore in the Gerrit project, but we |
| still use it as the name of the main development branch. A consensus is that we |
| should start developing against a new `main` branch in Gerrit. The old `master` |
| branch is going to be removed. |
| |
| The creation of new projects with an initial commit should be amended to use |
| `main` instead of `master`. |
| |
| ### Support for Gerrit v2.16 |
| |
| Gerrit v2.16 is still currently supported to allow users to migrate |
| to any v3.x version: all schemas migrations from any v2.x release, including the |
| conversion to NoteDb, require to go through that version. |
| |
| The Community is still spending a considerable effort to keep the change |
| validation active for the stable-2.16 branch. However, that is not sustainable |
| in the longer term because of the burden of supporting deprecated and obsolete |
| machinery. |
| |
| The ESC consensus is that the special [EOL status of Gerrit v2.16](2020-04-22-gerrit-3.2-release-plan.html#end-of-life-for-gerrit-216x.html) |
| will end when v3.5 is released. Existing v2.x users can continue to use the published |
| artifacts and the associated plugins on the [GerritForge's archive](https://archive-ci.gerritforge.com). |
| |
| The move is going to be largely publicised on the mailing list so that all |
| Gerrit users can have plenty of advance notification and take action before the |
| move. |
| |
| Existing users having issues with the migration to Gerrit v2.16 could request |
| bug fixes and ad-hoc releases through any vendor that provides |
| [Enterprise Support](https://www.gerritcodereview.com/support.html#enterprise-support). |
| |
| ### Accidental breakage of the conflicts UI in v3.4 |
| |
| During the release of Gerrit v3.4.0, the functionality of displaying of |
| [conflicting changes was accidentally broken](https://issues.gerritcodereview.com/issues/40013800). |
| The problem went unnoticed because there are not specific test validating the |
| feature, and it is not used anymore in any of Google's `*-review.googlesource.com` |
| sites. |
| |
| The breakage happened on Gerrit master and was later cherry-picked onto the |
| stable-3.4, self-approved, before the RC3, aligned with the |
| [Gerrit v3.4 release plan policies](https://www.gerritcodereview.com/2021-03-16-gerrit-3.4-release-plan.html). |
| |
| The consensus is that self-approval of changes should be disabled on Gerrit and |
| features that are not largely adopted or properly tested should be deprecated |
| and later removed. |
| |
| ### Review of open designs |
| |
| The review of the [Gerrit events compatibility](https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/c/homepage/+/302082) |
| design document is mostly stalled, with some comments still unanswered and the |
| focus unclear. |
| |
| Han-Wen took the action of documenting the Gooogle's Gerrit events system and |
| publish to the Gerrit Community so that it can be used as __blueprint__ for |
| future work in the open-source code-base. |