Portal:Toolforge/Admin/Monthly meeting/2024-01-16

Attendees: David Caro Seyram Komla Sapaty Taavi Väänänen Francesco Negri Raymond Olisaemeka
Previous meeting action items
* Let’s do something about uncontactable maintainers and abandoned tools in Q3/Q4. Related tasks:
** https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T148792
** https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T218239
** https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T320342
** This had some activity
* Discuss with the community how to restart the Toolforge Standards Committee. We can use the mailing list and/or the talk page, but we should not start this discussion until the grid migration is completed to avoid having too many discussions at the same time.
Agenda:
* Grid migration status/check-in
* Toolforge high level direction
* Backlog grooming - links to the backlogs at the top of Toolforge workgroup check-in meeting notes - 2024
* Buildpacks and maintenance
Notes
* Grid migration status
** TV: From the dashboard it seems it’s going very slow
** STS: The majority of disabled tools are completely abandoned, there was not much activity in phab for those. We have to start stopping tools in 1 month from now.
** TV: I think we will talk more about this in the WMCS team meeting
** DC: Should we send an email to remind people there is only 1 month left?
** STS: From the previous round, it seems email is ineffective, I’m trying to use talk pages this time. I will still send an email as well.
* Toolforge high level direction
** DC: I started writing a document to have a shared high-level roadmap, so that we can start working on some concrete tasks.
** TV: How long do we have to give feedback and what happens after that?
** DC: I think a week is enough, I don’t want this to last for months. Even if we don’t have a very detailed thing, it’s a start. After a week I will try integrating the ideas and suggestions and then fill up some tasks to work on.
** TV: I’m adding an action item to review the document and follow up.
** DC: I will send an email to cloud-admin as well
* Backlog grooming
** FN: Can we have a look at some of the backlog?
** FN: We should also consider making this regular, eg. 10-15 last minutes of these meetings. Thoughts? It could be an optional timeboxed section at the end of the monthly meeting.
** DC: It’s useful but it can be tiring.
** TV: Let’s try 10 minutes at the end of this meeting
* Buildpacks and maintenance
** DC: Many buildpacks we use are not maintained properly by the upstream, and we need to patch bugs locally. In practice we need to fork them and maintain them by ourselves
** DC: In some cases there are Paketo buildpacks that work better than Heroku ones. Paketo buildpacks are always cloud-native, and Heroku ones are not always. Considering changing the base builder image to Paketo if that is easily possible.
** DC: I don’t see the number of buildpacks we inject increasing a lot anymore.
** FN: Good to at least explore the alternatives. Are there other communities/companies in a similar situation?
** DC: I looked but I didn’t see much. The APT buildpack is not maintained, and I did not see any alternatives. Maybe someone will fork it at some point.
** TV: Do you think this will become a Decision Request or what’s the next step?
** DC: It will probably become a Decision Request including the information I have found, and we can decide which way to go. I can create a task for the investigation, and then another one for the Decision Request.
** RO: If Paketo buildpacks are probably maintained, then even if it takes some work it might be worth it.
** DC: Paketo’s community is a lot smaller, but some buildpacks are actively maintained. I didn’t find any Rust buildpacks for Paketo, we might have to re-use the one from Heroku or build our own.
** FN: If we switch to Paketo, can we use still use some Heroku buildpacks?
** DC: You need a wrapper, and it’s possible that the Heroku one has some convention that doesn’t work with Paketo. We would have to test it but I don’t think it would be a big blocker. There should not be a big different for the users switching from Heroku to Paketo.
Action items
* Carry-on from last meeting: Let’s do something about uncontactable maintainers and abandoned tools in Q3/Q4
* Carry-on from last meeting: Discuss with the community how to restart the Toolforge Standards Committee. We can use the mailing list and/or the talk page, but we should not start this discussion until the grid migration is completed to avoid having too many discussions at the same time.
* Everyone to review Toolforge user stories 2024 before 2024-01-23.
** David to send a reminder to cloud-admin@
** David to follow up afterwards
* David to investigate buildpack alternatives
* For next time: discuss if doing backlog grooming in this meeting makes sense, and how that ties with the WMCS team clinic duty