December TianoCore Meeting Minutes - EMEA/NAMO

December TianoCore Meeting Minutes - EMEA/NAMO

[stephano]

An HTML version is available here:
https://www.tianocore.org/minutes/Community-EMEA-NAMO-12.html

Community Updates
We have talks submitted to both FOSDEM and the OCP Summit:
https://fosdem.org/2019/
https://www.opencompute.org/summit/global-summit

FOSDEM Topics
UEFI Capsule Update
UEFI Overview - TianoCore & U-Boot

OCP Topics
TianoCore Roadmap

At the start of the community meetings, please feel free to introduce 
yourself if you'd like your attendance to be recorded in the minutes. 
This can be done on IRC (OFTC - #edk2) or on the zoom chat feature.

Please send feedback to me regarding the dates / times of these 
meetings. If no comments are heard I will assume that these dates and 
times are good.

January and February's meetings will both be held on *the second week* 
of the month to accommodate holidays.

Opens
We would like to setup demos of the current patch systems specific 
companies are using and record those sessions. Nate can do this for 
Gerrit and the folks at Microsoft can do the same for Github. John from 
MS volunteered to do a walk-through of the patch review system as well 
as CI. Stephano will contact potential demo hosts and setup a time that 
works for them as well as discuss any concerns with recording the session.

There were questions about the release process, specifically the 
differences between the UDK release and Stable Tag releases.

-For details on Stable Tags, please see the following links:
https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/EDK-II#stable-tags
https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/HardFeatureFreeze
https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/SoftFeatureFreeze

-A Stable Tag is more frequent than the UDK release. It is a demand 
based branch rather than a cadence.

If a branch is created by the community, is that branch maintained, 
curated, and allowed to have future versions?
-The community we will discuss how this is addressed.
-For now, much like the UDK, only critical fixes would be maintained.
-Please feel free to send additional questions / comments on a new thread.

Build system changes, optimizations of the build system, possibly moving 
to the make files:
-There are some Bugzilla entries for this concept:
https://bugzilla.tianocore.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1378
https://bugzilla.tianocore.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1302
https://bugzilla.tianocore.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1301
https://bugzilla.tianocore.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1288
https://bugzilla.tianocore.org/show_bug.cgi?id=972
-In the upcoming design meetings (TBD) we can discuss those bugs and 
review possible changes.
-Community members should feel free to comment on those bugs directly.

License Change
Mark Doran has made it clear that we'll be moving to an Apache 2.0 
license. There is an RFC with a detailed proposal here:
https://lists.01.org/pipermail/edk2-devel/2018-October/030385.html

If you are a copyright holder, please look at the RFC, give comments, 
and if there is a legal process for approval on your end, please start 
that process. Let us know if there are any concerns from your legal 
department. There is also a Bugzilla entry for details on code changes:
https://bugzilla.tianocore.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373

There will be a branch that Mike Kinney will create soon so that folks 
can review the changes to ensure that nothing is incorrect or might 
cause a build break. There is a script making this change, so the manual 
review of all these files will be difficult. Community assistance in 
reviewing those changes is appreciated.

Public Design and Bug Scrub Meetings
Stephano will send out an RFC to find a frequency and dates/times so 
that we can setup public design and bug scrub meetings. These are not 
meetings that everyone needs to join each occurance, however there will 
be required reviewers identified for specific features and bugs. There 
will be two meetings held, much like the Community Meeting format, to 
accommodate different time zones. Current thoughts are that Thursday AM 
(PST) for EMEA and PM (PST Friday AM Asia) would work, but please 
comment when the RFC is sent out if you have questions or comments. 
Making the design and bug scrub meeting agendas clear ahead of time is 
ideal. Stephano will head up that effort. Also, in each meeting we will 
collect the next week's possible topics.

//COMMENT
We need to have a process for the best way to begin a new design idea. 
We do have a "feature request" in Bugzilla. We also need a way to share 
documentation in terms of design. Stephano will send out an RFC 
regarding options for ways of sharing these documents. The design 
meeting can act as a clarification to possible new feature questions.

Patch Review Update
GitHub
Laszlo has been reviewing GitHub with the help of several folks at 
Microsoft. Microsoft currently relies on the Web UI of GitHub to archive 
all the details of their process. Laszlo did find some places where a 
"force commit" (as one example, there are others) would be visible only 
for a period of time, but will eventually be lost. There is a concern 
that the community may not find this level of logging acceptable.

Offline use has also been brought up as an issue for those traveling 
regularly or with intermittent internet connections in their location. 
We want the TianoCore community to remain open for all to contribute 
regardless of their location or access to reliable internet.

Stephano will send out a RFC, regarding both these issues. Please look 
at Laszlo's emails (they will be linked) and comment as to how these 
issues might effect your workflows. Details on any workarounds to these 
issues that folks have used or have researched are also appreciated.

GitLab
Philippe Mathieu-Daudé has volunteered to facilitate a review of GitLab 
and has invited Laszlo to participate. We do not want to overload Laszlo 
with review tasks so we ask that any community members who have time to 
work on reviewing this system to please contact Stephano. Ideally this 
person should be very familiar with our patch review process so that 
they can give detailed, objective insight into the functionality of the 
system.

Phabricator
Laszlo is currently working with Rebecca Cran to evaluate the features 
of Phabricator and there will be more info on this in upcoming emails.

//COMMENT
CI will be included in our discussion eventually, however we are 
focusing on patch review for now.

//COMMENT
There are future features in both GitLab and Phabricator that will be 
coming out in the near future. Also, if we could summarize the GitHub 
issues we could post them to their respective sites as feature requests. 
In the end, it is important to note which systems have features on the 
road map and which need feature request submitted. This will be called 
out in future summary emails / shared documents.

Collaboration Software
We will be assessing several collaboration software possibilities. We 
will proceed with testing these options on specific discussion topics, 
and those discussions will be logged and summarized for the mailing list 
so as not to lose any information.

Stephano will start discussions shortly on GitHub "Team Discussions". 
This discussions will cover our use of line endings as well as the 
possible use of standard C types. More of these tests will be forthcoming.

Thank you all for joining. As always, please feel free to email the list 
or contact me directly with any questions or comments.

Kind Regards,
Stephano Cetola
TianoCore Community Manager