3. January 2023

[dimakuv]

Agenda

• Active maintainers list
• Technical Charter in GitHub repo
• Active reviewers
• Review rules change

Active maintainers list

Dmitrii: we currently have a single list of maintaners, which is largely out-of-date (it contains currently inactive maintainers). See here: https://github.com/gramineproject/gramine/blob/v1.3.1/CONTRIBUTING.rst#management-team. Dmitrii would like to update this list, otherwise Gramine can end up in a situation when more than half of listed maintainers are not connected to the project anymore (which may lead to situations when e.g. active maintainers do not have enough votes to change rules of the Gramine project).

Michal: To make the changes to the list of maintainers, we need a voting procedure. One option is to update the maintainers list by creating a PR with the new list and asking everyone (including inactive maintainers) to approve/disapprove the PR.

Don: We need to amend the CONTRIBUTING file and the Technical Charter with "active maintainers" and "inactive maintainers" ("emeritus"). Plus update the list itself, moving some people to "inactive maintainers".

Dmitrii: We also need to amend the very last sentence in CONTRIBUTING from "current members" to "currently active members". I.e., voting should be the right of active maintainers.

Mona: there is inconsistency in naming in the CONTRIBUTING and the Technical Charter documents. We have "maintainers", "management team" and "TSC voting members". For now let's resolve this ambigiuty with this rule:

• active maintainers = management team = voting TSC members
• inactive maintainers = non-voting TSC members

Woju: TSC (Technical Steering Committee) from Technical Charter and the maintainers list from CONTRIBUTING are two different things: the TSC is more "political" and "high-level", the maintainers list is more "technical" and "low-level". So ideally the lists of members of TSC and of maintainers should be separate.

TODO(Dmitrii): Create a PR that changes CONTRIBUTING file with:

• new list of maintainers (adding Woju),
• splitting current maintainers into "currently active maintainers" and "inactive maintainers"; the latter have review rights but not voting rights
• DONE in [Docs] CONTRIBUTING.rst: Update the list of maintainers #1095

Technical Charter in GitHub repo

We forgot to add the Technical Charter document in the core Gramine repository.

Mona: currently, let's not modify the Technical Charter (this may involve non-trivial approval steps). Let's first concentrate on the maintainers list (first discussion point above).

Michal: Regarding TSC voting members -- maybe we should have one person in TSC from each organization (i.e., one person representing Intel, one representing ITL, one representing UNC, etc)?

• There were no objections to this rule.
• But decided to postpone these decisions. We first should add the Technical Charter as is to the GitHub repo.

TODO(Dmitrii): Create a PR that adds Technical Charter.

• DONE in [Docs] Add Technical Charter document #1097

Active reviewers

Dmitrii and Michal: now that Borys is inactive, we have two main reviewers for C/asm code in Gramine -- Dmitrii and Michal. This becomes the bottleneck.

Mona: we'd like to ramp up Kailun to become a reviewer. Michal: yes, but needs a bit more time (several months), so that Kailun gets accustomed to reviewing PRs.

Don and Chia-Che: can do reviews sporadically, maybe spending 1-2 hours a week on reviewing.

Review rules change

Given the current situation with two main reviewers (Dmitrii and Michal), we have a problem with the current reviewing rule: a fresh PR needs 3 reviewers' approvals to be merged, otherwise it has to wait for 5 days, and then the rule is relaxed to 2 reviewers' approvals. So we'll most probably have to wait for 5 days before we can merge even trivial PRs.

The proposal is to amend this rule to change the cutoff day from 5 days down to 3 days.

Don: In Don's experience, 3 days sounds like a reasonable threshold, because people tend to check a PR (or reply on PR comments) in a manner of 2-3 days.

Nobody seemed to object the proposal. But we'll wait for another week before amending this rule.