22:59:26 <ahf> #startmeeting Network team meeting, 6 november 2019
22:59:26 <MeetBot> Meeting started Wed Nov  6 22:59:26 2019 UTC.  The chair is ahf. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
22:59:26 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
22:59:32 <ahf> just changed to 7 november here :-)
22:59:35 <ahf> hello network-team!
22:59:52 <ahf> our pad is at https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-netteam-2019.1-keep
22:59:59 <ahf> who is here today?
23:00:08 * catalyst is here
23:00:52 <nickm> hihi
23:01:03 <ahf> o/ nickm & catalyst
23:01:45 <ahf> we have a big list of things today, so let us get started and see if more people will join us
23:01:56 <ahf> let's have a look at 042 status
23:02:08 <ahf> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/CoreTorReleases/042Status
23:02:39 <ahf> things seems OK to me there? no new very high tickets?
23:02:50 <mikeperry> I'm here also
23:02:52 * teor is here
23:02:59 <ahf> o/ mikeperry & teor
23:02:59 <nickm> Hi mike! Hi teor!
23:03:16 <ahf> nickm: anything you want to add to the 0.4.2 status meeting item?
23:04:25 <gaba> hi!
23:04:26 <nickm> so, I've been doing a release every 2 or 3 weeks. I think we should call the next one "rc" and do it next week
23:04:29 <nickm> anybody disagree
23:04:30 <nickm> ?
23:04:33 <nickm> welcome, gaba!
23:04:37 <ahf> sounds fine with me
23:04:38 <ahf> gaba: o/
23:04:53 <teor> #32103 has been abandoned by the original contributor, should we put it in 0.4.3 instead?
23:05:17 <nickm> Seems plausible.
23:06:30 <ahf> ok with me
23:06:40 <ahf> let's do roadmap shall we: https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/core/tor/-/boards
23:06:59 <ahf> make sure that everything in there is correct and reflects on what you are doing right now
23:07:00 <nickm> teor: are you able to edit that board now?
23:08:25 <teor> Yes, I have been editing the board every week for the last few weeks.
23:08:32 <nickm> great
23:09:09 <ahf> is everybody OK with the state of the board right now?
23:09:22 <nickm> ok w me
23:09:37 <ahf> are people OK with the reviews they have been assigned this week?
23:09:44 <ahf> anybody want to pass anything around to anybody else?
23:10:29 <nickm> I think on 1 Dec we'll have some stuff to move from "backlog" to "maybe someday"
23:10:55 <ahf> yes, we need to do a whole lot of roadmappy things around 1st of december i think
23:11:19 <gaba> yes
23:11:34 <ahf> ok, we have 3 announcements this week: remember to submit hours via harvest, we have team retrospective next week the 12th(!), and remember to migrate things over to our new fancy nextcloud install
23:11:52 <nickm> ahf: thing about hours.
23:12:09 <nickm> Every time in the past I had a backlog of hours, I needed to talk to whoever was behind offline.
23:12:10 <ahf> and maybe spend some time getting to know nextcloud is a good idea. i have been positively surprised about it in the texting period and it will let us do calendars, document sharing, etc. like we sometimes do with google docs
23:12:31 <nickm> (so it would be a good idea to reach out to whomever you need hours from)
23:12:38 <gaba> i created a group for network team and added you all there
23:12:41 <ahf> nickm: for harvest?
23:12:44 <nickm> yes
23:12:47 <gaba> there is also a calendar shared with the group (nextcloud)
23:12:58 <ahf> i don't do harvest yet, i think gaba and i need to talk about that with that i should maybe takeover that
23:13:00 <gaba> i can reach out to who is missing hours
23:13:02 <nickm> gaba: wrt the calendar, so far I have gotten two not-so-useful announcements
23:13:03 <gaba> i added that
23:13:08 <nickm> one told me about a meeting for 1 October
23:13:12 <gaba> mmm
23:13:20 <nickm> one told me about a meeting, in pacific time
23:13:33 <ahf> nickm: isn't that just the email that shows Los Angeles time?
23:13:34 <gaba> I will change the calendar to UTC
23:13:35 <nickm> if I adjust my settings, will I learn only about meetings in the future, wrt my time zone?
23:13:45 <ahf> the attached calendar thingy does the right thing
23:13:48 <gaba> I thought it was in utcl but maybe not
23:15:34 <ahf> yeah, probably some stuff could use some tuning
23:15:52 <ahf> ok, shall we start with the items:
23:15:55 <ahf> * anybody wants to volunteer for git admin from the network team?
23:16:04 <ahf> gaba: this is the one from the vegas team discussion, right?
23:16:22 <gaba> yes
23:17:00 <catalyst> ahf: this being for our self-hosted gitlab?
23:17:03 <ahf> okay, so each team needs to find a volunteer who will help maintaining the gitolite (and the tickets that gets created) for git.torproject.org - that is create new repos via the config file, modify permissions, etc.
23:17:16 <ahf> catalyst: it is for gitosis/gitolite or whatever it is it is called
23:17:21 <nickm> gitoline
23:17:24 <nickm> *gitolite
23:17:57 <nickm> but, um, what's the scope of responsibility?  Is this for network-team folks? for our repositories? for ...?
23:18:27 <gaba> this is to get more people to do that as it is lacking help with gitolite
23:18:29 <ahf> i think the scope is for the entire org, but the idea was to find a few people from different teams who are up for running it, as it is currently a bit unmaintained
23:18:38 <ahf> i think isa had a mail about it recently
23:19:06 <nickm> so technically I'm on the maintainer list but in practice I don't have time
23:19:15 <nickm> the file is easy to edit, and the admin tasks are simple
23:19:22 <ahf> if nobody is up for it, i will take it, with the aimed goal of course of getting everybody to become so happy that they move to gitlab instead
23:19:23 <nickm> but if we get no takers, we get no takers, and that's okay too
23:19:54 <ahf> next item:
23:19:55 <ahf> * C style poll: results sent to the network team list. What next?
23:19:56 <ahf> * Concrete proposal, BSD Kernel style with tweaks?
23:19:59 <ahf> i think this is by nickm
23:20:18 <ahf> gaba: who do i need to tell that i am the volunteer for this task?
23:20:25 <nickm> can't remember. is that yours, catalyst?
23:21:03 <gaba> ahf: i think roger brought hthis up. irl is also volunteering
23:21:24 <catalyst> nickm: hm, i had made the suggestion but nobody responded. maybe i can try asking more tersely?
23:21:51 <nickm> Maybe suggest a default and see if anybody wants to amend?
23:22:05 <ahf> gaba: ack
23:23:38 <ahf> what is the goal with the item? we discuss the choice here or?
23:23:47 <ahf> i don't remember these styles by name :-/
23:24:05 <nickm> BSD kernel is basically what we do now, but with 8-space tabs
23:24:07 <ahf> only the funky type notation for k&r
23:24:14 <catalyst> i can link to some example definitions (the three main BSDs)
23:24:24 <ahf> yeah, i remember liking the one from freebsd's style guide, minus the tabs
23:24:51 <catalyst> functionally we're pretty close to this already, and it'll help choose between alternatives that we didn't have strong consensus on
23:25:48 <catalyst> we should probably do this over email because EU people are probably sleepy or absent now
23:25:57 <nickm> so in practice, what I think we're going to wind up doing is "whatever tool X supports, plus some tweaks".  astyle and scan-format have bsd-knf defaults IIRC.  Uncrustify is a maze of twisty options, all alike.
23:26:06 <nickm> s/defaults/presets/
23:26:11 <ahf> what is the action item here? start a thread on network-team@ and then see what people think?
23:27:52 <ahf> let's continue on email :-)
23:27:59 <catalyst> i'll try starting a thread. hopefully people will respond this time
23:28:07 <ahf> next item is: * Roadmapping in December - (mostly s27, s28, s30) : gaba will send pad later in november to organize it.
23:28:22 <gaba> this is only to say that we should do that. I will organize it and send a mail about it
23:28:39 <ahf> catalyst: i think people will respond if there is somehting they are against here. i'm not so worried about these changes now after i saw how alligned i was with other people in nickm's survey
23:28:45 <ahf> gaba: awesome, thanks!
23:28:56 <ahf> next item is:
23:28:57 <ahf> What should tor's configure do?
23:28:58 <ahf> How should we prioritise existing downstreams, and a clean build interface?
23:28:58 <ahf> * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32191#comment:27
23:29:09 <ahf> ahh, that ticket
23:29:30 <ahf> it is of course confusing that we do lib handling different for two of the compression libs and not for everything else
23:29:44 <catalyst> that seems to me like an important topic. also maybe one that we probably won't cover well in the available time here?
23:29:45 <nickm> I think that thing requires diplomacy and thoughtfulness. There is a lot of work there, and there is a little work to do to get stuff mergeable.
23:30:28 <ahf> i think we had this discussion around --enable-android at some point too
23:32:04 <ahf> i do not know what a good solution is here. i always feel like touching these variables in configure.ac will probably break some other use-case, like people cross compiling tor on openwrt or whatever
23:32:32 <nickm> I think we're not far away from getting this working; we just need to do more work than anybody actually wants to do here.
23:32:47 <nickm> and half measures have the problem of breaking good use cases
23:33:08 <ahf> yeah
23:33:33 <catalyst> we could decide that we err on the side of explicit failure when we can't do something that the user specifically requested (--enable-* on the ./configure command line)
23:33:38 <teor> We're talking about a whole set of upstreaming tickets here, we merged #32191 after I made the changes I requested.
23:33:53 <ahf> teor: ah
23:34:50 <teor> The tickets contained a whole lot of code, all at once, and so it was hard to set expectations.
23:36:41 <ahf> yeah
23:37:17 <ahf> i don't think we will reach anything from discussing it here? i think what you did teor was very nice and got that extracted and merged
23:37:36 <ahf> next item is:
23:37:38 <ahf> * It's a public US holiday on Monday and Alex is traveling in the evening. Should we move the meeting to Wednesday next week at the same time as the meeting today?
23:37:58 <ahf> anybody objecting to moving the meeting next week to wednesday at the same time?
23:38:05 <ahf> it does mean having two meetings on the 12th i think
23:38:10 * gaba is ok with it
23:38:13 <ahf> including one retrospective and one team meeting
23:38:27 <gaba> oh
23:38:42 <teor> When you say "same time" do you mean 1700 UTC or 2300 UTC?
23:38:57 <ahf> err, sorry, same day
23:39:14 <ahf> i was thinking having team meeting the 12th at 23 UTC
23:39:21 <ahf> what time is the retrospective, gaba?
23:39:48 <gaba> just a sec
23:40:11 <gaba> i think it was at the same time of the meeting...
23:40:25 <gaba> as it is the time it works the best for most of the people
23:40:41 <ahf> hm, maybe we should do tuesday at 23 UTC and wednesday at 23 UTC?
23:41:02 <ahf> and tell people to prioritize the retrospective
23:41:09 <catalyst> i think what we've done before for Monday holidays is delay the meeting by 24 hours?
23:41:24 <ahf> we can also do that, yeah, so tuesday at ... 17 UTC?
23:41:30 <gaba> +1 to delay for 24hs
23:41:39 <catalyst> i think 18:00 UTC because DST ended
23:41:44 <ahf> err, thanks catalyst!
23:41:49 <ahf> yes! 18 UTC on tuesday
23:41:55 <nickm> all options here are okay for me with a preference for not 2300 utc, since that's dinner time for me during c
23:42:08 <ahf> gaba: and retrospective the 12th at 18 UTC too?
23:42:09 <nickm> during non-dst hours
23:42:14 <teor> I have the retrospective as 2000 UTC Tuesday 12 November, but I would be happier with 2300 UTC.
23:42:46 <teor> (If we schedule retrospectives at 1800 UTC, I won't be there, because that's my 4am)
23:42:51 <gaba> right, we had it for 2000 utc
23:43:04 <ahf> let's keep it what we scheduled, so we only fiddle with one meeting
23:43:09 <nickm> +1 on that.
23:43:12 <ahf> so team meeting at 18 utc, retrospective at 20 utc
23:43:19 <ahf> then people have a break of an hour between them
23:44:05 <ahf> ok, i see no objections there?
23:44:29 <ahf> next item: * When shall we do some more stable releases?
23:44:38 <nickm> that's from me.
23:44:57 <nickm> we haven't put out an 0.4.1 or 0.4.0 or 0.3.5 in a while. We should gear up to do that.  Any thoughts when?
23:47:18 <ahf> would it make sense to wait to a bit after 0.4.2 rc's are out?
23:47:50 <ahf> with all the sponsors coming to an end maybe we should just wait and get it into the planning we do around 1st of december?
23:47:57 <nickm> not sure.  there will always be alpha code, and it's been since September since our last stable
23:48:06 <nickm> but waiting for dec wouldn't be horrible
23:48:42 <teor> Let's do it late November/early December?
23:49:04 <gaba> maybe early dec so we are done with s31 ?
23:49:17 <teor> +1
23:49:38 <nickm> okay, let's plan for it then
23:50:13 <teor> I added the retrospective time to: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam#MeetingsSchedule
23:50:30 <ahf> teor: i have a question on the pad for the CI and review role policy. i think i voted +1 to that an hour or so ago
23:50:42 <teor> Please update your timezone for daylight saving time, if it hasn't been already
23:50:59 <ahf> and i think right now based on the mailing list that gaba and mike is missing to vote on it? but i think nickm might also have a question about it?
23:51:19 <nickm> I do not think that our policy requires everybody to vote. If we reach the end of the period and enough people have said +1 and nobody has said -1, it becomes provisional policy
23:52:00 <ahf> so i guess that is what happened some 52 min. ago?
23:52:11 <ahf> and then we all need to vote again or just the people who haven't voted yet?
23:52:20 <nickm> Unless the clock started ticking again every time the policy was revised?
23:52:42 <teor> Yes, that's true. The revisions contain the target date.
23:52:51 <ahf> i don't know the answer to that, if nothing have changed to the spec and only time have ratched forward i'd assume that my vote is still as valid as it was before there
23:52:56 <ahf> unless i pull it back for some reason
23:54:52 <nickm> So I suggest two things: 1) we think of clarifications for the proposal policy to address this stuff.
23:54:55 <teor> So I provided a final clean version, with a voting period end date, and then people voted, and now we're at the end of the voting period?
23:55:06 <nickm> 2) we declare the thing to be provisionally accepted.
23:55:25 <nickm> If anybody objects, they just say "-1" and it is no longer provisionally accepted
23:55:28 * ahf is cool with (2) given the amounts of +1'es
23:55:39 <teor> (I probably provided too many clean versions, sorry about that, I'm still working out how this process works.)
23:55:49 <catalyst> i thought my previous vote still counted because of no substantive change since i made it
23:55:54 <nickm> If they don't think that it should have been provisionally accepted for even one day, we'll have a good learning experience about saying "-1" earlier.
23:56:29 <ahf> :-)
23:56:30 <catalyst> could we maybe not spend a lot of time splitting hairs about process if the risk of stuff being challenged seems small?
23:56:51 <nickm> +1 on that tool
23:56:54 <nickm> *too
23:57:09 <ahf> so (2) it is?
23:57:24 <nickm> I was suggesting 1 and 2.
23:57:28 <ahf> ah, both!
23:57:33 <ahf> that is cool with me too
23:57:34 <nickm> let's do 2, and also clarify the process so it's easier next time
23:57:37 <teor> I agree with (1) and (2), but think we should do clarifications on the list, not here.
23:57:38 <ahf> yes
23:57:41 <ahf> yes
23:57:44 <ahf> great
23:57:46 <ahf> i see one help with:
23:58:00 <ahf> - would like extra review on #32399 (test-stem) because i still can't get test-stem to work reliably
23:58:04 <ahf> from catalyst
23:58:23 <ahf> anybody with some stem knowledge that is up for helping here?
23:58:29 <teor> Stem has known intermittent failures, see #30901 and related tickets
23:58:42 <teor> But I can run it, then merge
23:58:51 <teor> Run #32339, then merge if it passes
23:58:52 <catalyst> teor: ok, thanks
23:59:26 <nickm> teor: btw, I tried to get stuff done on #30866 but I ran into "issues" as explained on the ticket. I fixed one but not the other.
23:59:46 <ahf> catalyst: was that helpful enough to make it not that much of a concern for now or?
00:00:23 * ahf thinks the asn comment is from last week
00:00:41 <catalyst> ahf: yeah, i think so. we should still try to make stem more reliable
00:00:53 <ahf> catalyst: yep!
00:01:10 <teor> I have prioritised sponsor 31 and 0.4.2 over #30901, but I can get back to it in December
00:01:35 <ahf> sounds good, teor
00:01:46 <ahf> ok, unless amybody have anything else i'm gonna end the meeting (and go to bed) :-)
00:01:57 <gaba> thanks! o/
00:02:03 <ahf> i will send out minutes tomorrow and an email with reminders of next week's meetings
00:02:06 <ahf> thanks all o/
00:02:07 <ahf> #endmeeting