[edk2-announce] Community Meeting Minutes

[stephano <stephano.cetola@linux.intel.com>]

An HTML version is available here:
https://www.tianocore.org/minutes/Community-2019-02.html

Github Pull Requests
---------------------
We are still considering Github as a possible platform for patch review. 
There are two issues we'd like to overcome:

1. comprehensive email notifications or backup/archival functionality
2. workflow for users that do not have a consistent internet connection

The notification issue degrades our current ability to archive the 
history of a patch review. Github notifications do not provide:

1. the subject line of the patch
2. trailing code context of comments (code that comes AFTER the comment)
3. the commit message

In this way, it is hard to avoid losing the meaning of the pull request 
conversation if we were to move to a different system some day. The 
longevity of PR branches is also a concern, and a workaround would need 
to be found and maintained. We need to be sure that PR branches can be 
easily archived so that if a Github user deletes their account, even if 
their PR was rejected, the code would be available.

Jeremiah and I are both looking for work around to these issues, 
hopefully without having to maintain more code. See here for details on 
Laszlo's thorough Github evaluation:

https://lists.01.org/pipermail/edk2-devel/2018-December/033509.html

To be clear, these hurtles do not *have to be* overcome. They were 
brought up by several maintainers and community members. They are simply 
barriers that we want to discuss fully before committing to a 
transition. It is impossible to "change our mind" on this transition 
without some loss of data, so best we be sure before we switch.

Working in a community means providing consistent messaging, clear 
expectations, and the understanding that each member is valuable. 
Working in the open means moderating, evaluating, and distilling input 
from community members and companies without bias or prejudice. I take 
this transition seriously and do not plan to rush it.

Gerrit Code Review
---------------------
Gerrit code review is viable platform, but Intel's implementation of the 
'repo' tool is still working on being open sourced. Also, there would be 
a lot of work that would go into implementing a proper Gerrit solution. 
If someone would like to volunteer to carry this out, please feel free 
to contact me, but I'm going to postpone this for the moment as my 
schedule is rather full.

Groups.io
---------------------
Laszlo and I will evaluate Groups.io, however initial impressions is 
that this will work as a communication platform going forward. We'd like 
to use this for design discussions and as a replacement for our current 
mailing list as 01.org does not allow attachments or whistling. Also, 
Groups.io allows for online search of the list, chats, and uploads which 
is much easier for some than searching through emails. Assuming this is 
successful, I will work with 01.org to archive all (if possible) of the 
edk2-devel mailing list into groups.io for a (mostly) seamless 
transition. I will see how long 01.org is willing to store archives, and 
will notify the community of how long that archive will be available.

Community Bug Triage
---------------------
Community bug triage meetings will occur every two weeks, and we will 
have 2 meetings to accommodate both sets of timezones. See here for details:

https://www.tianocore.org/bug-triage/

I will be working to develop bugzilla reports and researching possible 
platforms that we could add to a community CI. Maintaining these 
platforms would be a great way to add to the list of community bugs and 
encourage open development.

Community Design
---------------------
We will be starting the community design meetings in March and holding 
them every 2 weeks. If we find that there are enough submissions we can 
meet every week. I will hold two meetings, much like the community 
meetings. Any submission will be discussed in both meeting and notes 
sent out in the meeting minutes. Discussion can then continue on the 
mailing list. I will send out an RFC for folks to submit possible topics 
the day before each meeting.

Rust in EDK II Exploration Notes
------------------------------------------
I have been working with the Rust community, as well as members of 
Intel's Firmware Security teams, to explore the benefits of using Rust 
in EDK II. For those of you who have never heard of Rust, please take 
some time to look into it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)

Here is a brief overview of the pros/cons:

Benefits of Rust
Rust is a modern language with features like counted buffers and 
strings. It can call C code and be called by C code. It requires no 
calls to "free", and does so without garbage collection by statically 
inserting calls to "free" for you. Rust types keep track of which 
structs own which memory chunks so that developers do not have to keep 
track of ownership of struct memory. Rust includes a lot of 
functionality not found in C. These features include Unicode support, an 
ecosystem library, structural types, and matching (it is very easy to 
wrap types as a "SUCCESS" or "FAILURE WITH ERROR CODE"). Rust has no 
NULL pointers as that concept has its own type, which makes for cleaner 
semantics. It has a robust built in macro system. For example, when you 
get a compilation error in code calling a macro, the compiler will be 
able to show you where in the macro the failure occurred.

Drawbacks of Rust
Rust is a younger language, though there are many examples of where it 
has been used in production. As such, many features one might take for 
granted in C still do not exist in Rust, or are newly added. For 
example, variadic functions (varargs) were just recently added. There 
are other corner cases of "things you can do in C" that still need to be 
added. Rust does have a great package management system (called cargo - 
crates are packages), but in a system like EDK2, we will want to limit 
those outside dependencies. Sub-command cargo-vendor is a tool where you 
can pin package versions and update them only as needed.

TianoCore in the News
---------------------
Here's my presentation from FOSDEM:

https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/uefi_boot_for_mere_mortals/

I collaborated with Alexander Graf from SUSE. I'll be giving this talk 
again at LinuxFest Northwest (http://linuxfestnorthwest.org).

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