[tor-dev] Notes from network team meeting Wed 3/23/2016

Wed Mar 23 22:16:07 UTC 2016

tl;dr; important updates related to triage process and important
discussion topics related to release guidelines draft. Also, help needed
to get 0.2.8 out. Pay attention to next meeting time! It's new!

== Notes from little t Tor team - Wed March 23rd @ #tor-dev

== Participants + updates:

    * nickm - working on modularity documentation + reviewing, merging,
fixing bugs. Got coverity autobuilds to happen 3 times a week, we can
have others if desired (up to 8 a week). This link might be useful: 
https://people.torproject.org/~nickm/tor-auto/ - next week: more triage
and planning things. Finish up modularity ideas and v1 implementation
for most of them; release 0282rc

    * isabela - I migrated all the info  you added into the spreadsheet
back to trac (thanks for doing it); worked on the release guidelines
first draft with nick and y'all has it now; trying to organize the next
step on triagging (need some answers to help guide it / email I sent
yesterday);

    * asn - did some guard research, also did some hackerone triaging.
Finally I also did some work on prop224 specifically on the cell
formats. i have a torspec branch with initial changes here:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010561.html -
I also started a thread about more singificant changes to the cell, here
it is https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010560.html

    * armadev - I actually wrote a tiny bit of Tor code lately (#18332).
I mostly have questions though (from thinking this morning): a) Where is
the 0.2.8 timeline posted? Maybe it should be on the network team trac
page? Or somewhere else? b) I see athena mentioning backporting the
#18570 patch. Do we (you) have consensus on what is worth backporting?
Should we (you)? (i would argue that the patch doesn't want a backport)
(i see the questions for me about prop224. i am being a bad person and
not being able to keep the 224 design in my head. that makes it hard to
usefully answer questions. :/ )

    * dgoulet - code review and a bit of patches last week, got sucked
in LibrePlanet during friday/weekend/monday and I basically catched up
on things yesterday. I plan to continue prop224 implementation today as
I'm moving to do the cache work for HSDir. so I still need to answer
bunch of people on email including GsoC stuff for HS but hoping to jump
back in the coding arena

    * athena - merged #18570 past week (but it needs code review for
backport to 0.2.7; on it); now digging into some code reviews (working
on #7478)

== Discussion topics and action items:

Backport strategy
Athena will take over 0.2.7 (and any other previous release if she can)
- this means doing the backports / merges / releases. Athena could start
by going over all the tickets in maint-0.2.7 and saying which should get
backported, which not?  armadev and weasel will have opinions.
About backport policy in general, here is a draft:
http://paste.debian.net/418364/
Isabela will look in the wiki for any old notes related to this topic
and create a new page for our policy on Network Team's wiki.
#idea: two-person approval to backport?
#commnet: a nice side effect of a good backport policy is that it saves
time and effort

0.2.8 timeline
Timeline was freeze-start-of-march, then rc mid-march, we did the freeze
ontime and now the rc is late. And we are concerned about when it will
be ready to go out.
Folks should prioritize 0.2.8 release and 0.2.9 *triage*. If everybody
else jumps into 0.2.9 without nick, and/or without triage, bad stuff
will happen.  Most obviously, 0.2.8 will be slow, and everything else
will get off track with 0.2.9.
Tickets that we are waiting on a decision are market with the tag:
'must-fix-before-028-rc', we will probably ignore those marked as
'needs-info'. During discussion people took tickets to review and we
will follow up in the next meeting.
About timelines in general we are trying to build guidelines (timeline)
for all releases. once is finalize we will add it to the wiki

Summarize promising gsoc students for network team topics?
We decided on the both actions items:
    * get quick list of network-team-related projects
    * somebody ask atagar if there are network team projects without
enough adequate associated possible mentors

Discuss draft plans for 029 release/triage/etc.
We reviewed priority list and capacity formula in the pad:
https://storm.torproject.org/shared/71UUCvDgDA6q9lfdndAtRZoWQdjz4Wb8EoX0eLyBiYq
Most important thing to do from now till Friday is to make sure tickets
on 0.2.9.x-final milestone has the following information:
    * points - small == <1 day (a task you can get done in a day)|
medium == <1 week | large == +1week
    * owner (assign a ticket to yourself if you are the one doing the task)
    * priority
    * sponsor -must and -can information
If you want to suggest a ticket to be part of 0.2.9 now is the time to
add it to the milestone.
The above will give us the necessary information to organize our release
until it has a good size for the team.

Discussion about tickets workflow
We will send an email to tor-dev talking about adding a step to the
workflow ("need_merge", "ready_merge") to indicate that it has been
reviewed and someone did Acked it. Check if other dev teams objects
against havingt his step.

Milestones discussion
We decided to talk about the "Making traige stick" in the pad
We discussed how we can have control of what goes in and out of a
release after we are done triaging it. One thing could be by chaning the
permissions for the milestone, so there must be a team agreement for
things to be added.
We discussed about creating a bucket (milestone or keyword) to know what
are the tickets people would like us to consider for the release.
This discussion is part of the team routines discussion. These buckets
will help us organize tickets we will be looking at during our check in
moments on irc. See in the pad the team routine to see what check ins we
are planning to do weekly, monthly and by release.

Action Items
------------

    asn publish the latest prop259 revision
    nickm publich the modularity document as it stands
    examine/merge asn's changes in
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010561.html
    send new prop224 to mailing list when it's done
    asn explains the prop224 questions to arma? :)
    athena bangs on 0.2.7
    isabela to add backport policy to the wiki
    somebody needs to go over this with the devs who weren't here.
    isabela asks about ready_for_merge

== Next meeting and other updates:
STARTING ON MARCH 28 our meeting times will move:
Primary meeting     Monday 1700 UTC     Monday 7:00pm CEST     Monday
1:00pm EDT     Monday 10:00am PDT
Patch party!     Tuesday 2300 UTC     Wednesday 1:00am CEST     Tuesday
07:00pm EDT     Tuesday 4:00pm PDT

-- 
PM at TorProject.org
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@isa

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