[edk2-announce] Community Meeting Minutes

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

An HTML version is available here:
https://www.tianocore.org/minutes/Community-2019-01.html

Community Updates
-----------------
Several conferences are coming up that we will be attending.

FOSDEM 2019
Stephano will be giving a talk with Alexander Graf (SUSE) on UEFI usage 
on the UP Squared board and Beagle Bone Black.

More info on FOSDEM here:
https://fosdem.org/2019/

Info on the talk here:
https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/uefi_boot_for_mere_mortals/

Open Compute Project Global Summit
https://www.opencompute.org/summit/global-summit

No TianoCore talks were accepted for this event, however Stephano will 
be talking about CHIPSEC.
https://sched.co/JinT

Other Upcoming Conferences
Linuxfest NW
PyCon
Redhat Summit
RustConf

Rust
----
Stephano is working with some folks from the Open Source Technology 
Center at Intel regarding their desire to get Rust ported to EDK2. While 
there are many proof of concepts out there, the first step for adoption 
would be to integrate the Rust infrastructure into our build system, and 
create a simple "hello world" app. The goal would be to provide a modern 
language with better memory safety for writing modules and drivers. Our 
hope is that the availability of this language would encourage outside 
contribution and support from a vibrant and well established open source 
community.

Github Discussions Evaluation, Groups.io, Microsoft Teams
---------------------------------------------------------
During our December community meeting, we talked about trying out 
"GitHub Discussions" as a basis for communication that might be better 
than our current mailing list situation. The main issues with the 
mailing list today are:

1. Attachments are not allowed.
2. Email addresses cannot be "white listed" (If you are not subscribed 
your emails are simply discarded by the server).

In order to save us some time, Stephano reviewed GitHub discussions 
using 3 GitHub user accounts, and found the following shortcomings:

1. No support for uploading documents, only images
2. No way to archive discussions outside GitHub[1]
3. Any comment can be edited by any member
4. Discussions are not threaded

[1] Email notification archiving is possible, but this means we'd have 
to keep a mailing list log of our conversations. At that point, why not 
just use email?

That last one is particularly difficult to work around. Every comment is 
added to the bottom of the list. If some small group of developers (out 
of many) start having a “sub discussion”, their replies will not be 
separate from the main thread. There’s no way to distinguish and 
visually “collapse” a sub thread, so one is forced to view the 
discussion as a whole. It would seem that the "discussion feature" was 
intended for small, single threaded discussions. This will not work for 
larger complex system design discussions.

Also, the ability to edit comments is perplexing. Any member can edit 
any comment, and delete any of their comments or edits. No email 
notifications are provided for these actions, so there may be no 
document trail for parts of the conversation. This system seems quite 
inadequate for serious development discussions and is clearly meant for 
a more "chat" style of communication on smaller teams. Comments and 
questions regarding "GitHub Discussions" are still welcomed, but 
Stephano recommends we move forward with trying out different systems 
with more robust feature sets.

It was agreed that we will evaluate Groups.io next to see if that is a 
better fit for our needs. Stephano will setup accounts as needed and do 
some preliminary testing. If that goes well he will initiate discussions 
on "Line Endings" as well as "Use of C Standard Types".

Microsoft Teams was also brought up as a possible solution. If Groups.io 
fails to provide a good platform for us, we will look into Teams. The 
main barrier to entry there may be the cost. We have found that many of 
the software options we have been evaluating have this cost barrier to 
entry. We need to decide if this is truly a "no-go" issue for using 
software as a community. If TianoCore was an organization that had 
non-profit status, it might be easier for us to get non-profit discounts 
on software like this. Stephano will bring this up at the Steward's 
Meeting next week.

Patch Review System Evaluation
------------------------------
After evaluating Github, Gitlab, and Phabricator, we will be remaining 
with the mailing list for now. Github did prove a possible "2nd runner 
up" (albeit distant). Also, Stephano / Nate from Intel will be reviewing 
Gerrit use with a report being sent back to the community sometime next 
week.

Community CI Environment
------------------------
Azure DevOps, Cirrus CI, Jenkins, Avacado
We will begin evaluation of possible community test frameworks. This 
again brings up the question of how we would fund such an effort, and 
Stephano will bring this up at the Steward's meeting. It is important to 
remember that our supported environments are Linux, Windows, and macOS. 
We have compilers that are considered "supported" and those combinations 
should have proper coverage. Also, we do not want to use multiple CI 
environments, so the solution we choose should support all use cases. 
There are several CI options that are "Free for open source" but they 
limit the size / number of CI agents, with pricing tiers for larger 
sized builds. The cost of a CI infrastructure will be dependent on the 
number of patches we need to send through the service, and what kind of 
response is required. Stephano will work with Philippe on Avacado, the 
folks at MS will evaluate possible use of Azure DevOps (again, possibly 
limited by the fact that we are not a non-profit), and volunteers are 
still required to test Cirrus and Jenkins.

Public Design / Bug Scrub Meetings
----------------------------------
We'd like to get public meetings started in February for design 
overviews and bug scrubs. Stephano will be working with Ray to set these 
up. The hope is that we will have 1 meeting per month to start for bug 
scrubs. Design meetings will be dependent on how many design ideas have 
been submitted. The design meetings could also be used to discuss RFC's 
from the mailing list.


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