Meeting 2016-03-18

Participants

  • Daniele Gagliardi DGA
  • Martin Hamant MHA
  • Stéphane Laurière SLA
  • Alex Lefebvre ALE - chat only, joined 10min before end
  • Daniel Le Berre DLB
  • Jean Parpaillon JPA

Minutes

TC meetings organization

Since only 5 persons joined, we moved to audio (Skype for now). This raises the question of future meetings: we shall use audio instead, an open-source solution preferably such as Jabber or Matrix.

Actions:

  • Next meeting: Fri 01/04 11:00am - 12:00am
  • See if we run the meeting in audio or chat, select a tool (open-source software)

GitLab

  • DLB has been using it since 2,5 years.
  • GitLab overtook Gitorious
  • Now it's really powerful, projects can be imported from other forges, it increased a lot in the last year
  • New releases every 22d of each month
  • JPA: we need good integration with quality tools: continuous integration
  • DLB: webhooks are available in the community edition, it allows to communicate with different continous integration servers. Paid version for advanced integration (eg badges appearing on projects). Servers + workers archictecture.
  • DGA: in favour of giving a try to the continous integration, especially with Jenkins
  • DGA: GitLab provides its own wiki, while we would like to promote XWiki
  • DLB is using the GitLab integrated CI. Flexible runner architecture, very convenient. Completely different from Jenkins but very handy. It's not meant specifically to Java, but Maven is supported out of the box mostly. Decentralized approach, any kind of workers. 
  • See also http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/integration/jenkins.html
  • DGA: Engineering uses JIRA intensively: user stories, epics, risk management. How configurable is GitLab with issue management?
  • DLB: there is nothing better than JIRA, but you can do SCRUM, drag issues from milestones to others. Integrated todo list creation from issues. Fine for small teams. Small project management tool. No dependency among issues (main missing feature). 
  • DLB: projects can be either private, or only visible to members or public. Very handy. GitLab started to use their own dog food  and things have improved a lot.
  • MHA: how are files / downloads managed? OW2 needs to host the builds in a CDN. How to handle "official" package publication? eg http://forge.ow2.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=23
  • DLB: build artefacts are hosted on the server. A deploy script can push the builds to a CDN. GitLab does not support this feature. See also Ruby on rails which uses a dedicated Git branch for releases. Release management Not well suited yet for Java projects. Limited LDAP groups in community edition. GitLab 8.5 supports release: add a tag in Git, and attach files to it, very Git oriented: https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/22/gitlab-8-2-released/
  • MHA: project membership has probably to be managed directly in GitLab, not in the OW2 LDAP.
  • DGA: identify the missing services
  • DLB: it's important to update GitLab every month (22d), very neat process, no problem since 2 years
  • DLB: 1000 projects, 600 users, 4 GB RAM for GitLab, MySQL, SonarQube (Ruby issues with data connection in MySQL / broken connection).
  • DGA prefers PostgreSQL

Actions:

  • DLB will register accounts for all to have a deeper look at GitLab (done)
  • Install GitLab
  • Test authentication
  • Test LDAP connection
  • Test migration from existing forges to GitLab, eg with Spago4Q
  • Test CI integration
  • Replicate the OW2 publish process

Backup notes

Not discussed during the meeting:

Contest 2016

Goal: Contest business plan

  • Make the Contest more widely known
  • Involve more students and teachers
  • Recruit some sponsors (hardware, books, travels, magazines, conferences, ...)

Items to be discussed:

  • What do we include in the flyer (see draft on the Contest site)
  • How can we "compete" with other initiatives such as the GSoC
  • Who is interested in contacting teachers and students
  • Can / should we act as a proxy to external Contests such as Inria "Boost your code" (idea by JPA)
  • Topic submission: please start submitting at https://contest.ow2.org
  • Contest collaborative infrastructure to follow up with the teams, and distribute the evaluation tasks

Various notes

Topics: testing, Forge v2, user management service update (Fusion Directory integration)

  • Update on the infra
    Some questions:
  • Has anyone experience with FusionDirectory / is willing to help in the context of the new OW2 user management service
  • Which testing tools are you using or do you foresee using (context: EU research project submission)
  • We had sketched a plan around a composed forge (see Forge requirements), meantime GitLab is progressing well and the restricted branding constraint has been dropped from the Community Edition plus Daniel has set up a GitLab in production at University Artois, our plan needs to get updated

TC organization

  • Membership update status
  • How often should we have meetings
  • What is the most appropriate channel: IRC, Webex, any open-source software conference call system (Matrix, Jabber, ...?)