16:59:12 <ahf> #startmeeting network team meeting, 23 march 2020
16:59:12 <MeetBot> Meeting started Mon Mar 23 16:59:12 2020 UTC.  The chair is ahf. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
16:59:12 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
16:59:15 <ahf> hello network-team
16:59:22 <ahf> https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-netteam-2020.1-keep is our pad
16:59:26 <ahf> who is here for the meeting?
16:59:27 <jnewsome> o/
16:59:39 <gaba> hi!
16:59:45 <catalyst> o/
16:59:50 <dgoulet> hi
17:00:45 <asn> o/
17:00:59 <ahf> https://gitlab.torproject.org/torproject/core/tor/-/boards are folks doing OK with roadmapped items?
17:01:23 * nickm is here
17:01:45 <nickm> i'm roadmapped on walking onions spec but I don't see that there
17:01:51 <nickm> looking again...
17:02:12 <gaba> yes, I think I did not add that ticket
17:02:33 <gaba> do you remember which # is?
17:02:35 <nickm> we should talk about this tomorrow at our 1:1:1, gaba + ahf. this kanban is not our roadmap
17:02:47 <gaba> mmm, ok
17:03:02 <gaba> we need to roadmap again
17:03:05 * ahf nods
17:03:09 <gaba> this has all the tickets from our last roadmap exercise
17:03:18 <gaba> no the ones like walking onions that we didnt do in that roadmap
17:03:26 <gaba> but let's talk tomorrow
17:03:28 <nickm> It's #33527
17:04:09 <nickm> +1
17:04:33 <ahf> sounds good
17:04:38 <ahf> dgoulet: you did reviewers already?
17:04:44 <ahf> i think i saw that with half an eye
17:05:04 <ahf> looks they are all allocated
17:05:13 <dgoulet> ahf: I did
17:05:22 <asn> dgoulet: thx for doing reviwers!
17:05:36 <ahf> thanks to both of you in general for doing this - is good!
17:05:44 <ahf> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/CoreTorReleases/043Status let's look at 0.4.3
17:05:50 <ahf> nickm: anything you want to add there?
17:06:21 <asn> what should i do with #29220?
17:06:30 <asn> it's off the roadmap but still on the milestone
17:06:31 <nickm> i don't have anything right now...
17:06:34 <asn> off the roadmap and sponsor
17:06:37 <asn> should i push it to unspecified?
17:07:14 <ahf> it is a should ticket, so i assume it can be pushed to 0.4.4?
17:07:35 <asn> ack
17:07:38 <asn> will do!
17:09:01 <ahf> okay, we have quite a few discussion topics
17:09:15 <ahf> first one is from teor around #32804 - travis CI issues with macOS
17:09:32 <ahf> one question they are raising is if we should disable tor and the chutney travis ci jobs there?
17:09:46 <ahf> they are still awaiting response from the support team there asfaik
17:10:56 <nickm> imo I can see it being sensible either way
17:11:04 <ahf> nobody? i think we should wait with what they say if theey back to us
17:11:21 <ahf> yep
17:11:28 <nickm> they are on leave this week but I think it would be lovely if somebody wrote a ci policy about what we do in these cases
17:11:36 <catalyst> how long has it been failing?
17:12:07 <ahf> good idea
17:12:13 <ahf> catalyst: not for long i think. i think it was discovered last week
17:12:14 <nickm> the linked ticket is from 3 months ago, but it is supposed to have gotten worse recently
17:12:19 <ahf> yeah
17:12:26 <ahf> it has been flaky before but it now it happens more often
17:13:15 * catalyst looks at travis dashboard
17:14:18 <ahf> the same question applies sort of for jenkins
17:14:24 <ahf> a lot of our jenkins builders have had issues
17:14:24 <catalyst> i'm seeing a number of "errored" states for pull requests from what look like new contributors. we might want to think about disabling the erroring job sooner rather than later
17:14:33 <ahf> nickm: which one of them are essential for the release work?
17:14:46 <nickm> none of this is _essential_ for release, but they all help
17:14:50 <ahf> catalyst: so you prefer disabling it for now?
17:15:02 <nickm> disabling or "can-fail"-ing bogus stuff is probably better than leaving it
17:15:08 <ahf> nickm: also for jenkins? i had the feeling jenkins was important for releases?
17:15:11 <catalyst> allow_fail is probably better
17:15:17 <nickm> i worry about the cases when nobody has responsibility for fixing
17:15:26 <ahf> right
17:15:30 <nickm> for jenkins it's not so bad since it doesn't bother contributors, only releasers
17:15:53 <ahf> catalyst: would you be up for enabling the allow_fail for those builds then after the meeting?
17:16:25 <nickm> catalyst: I think you've advocated for automatically allow_fail on upstream failures in the past.  is that right?
17:16:32 <nickm> if so I think i'm coming around to that pov
17:17:01 <catalyst> nickm: i think something like that? maybe not automatically, but more like fast-tracking setting allow_fail
17:17:32 <catalyst> i still think we should consider it case-by-case, but the default should be to allow_fail
17:17:37 <nickm> yeah
17:17:46 <catalyst> maybe somehow making sure we re-revaluate at useful intervals
17:17:53 <nickm> let's try that with these and consider making it our policy
17:18:12 <nickm> for jenkins, we should fix them, but it takes work
17:18:18 <nickm> (i think that's  all i have)
17:19:15 <ahf> okay
17:19:25 <ahf> catalyst: would you be up for enabling that flag for tor.git ?
17:19:50 <catalyst> ahf: sure. there are a few things i have to check first
17:19:59 <ahf> okay, thanks catalyst!
17:20:10 <ahf> Should we defer the 0.4.3 stable release plan?  Nick suggests rc on April 3, planning for stable release by end of april. No delay to subsequent release
17:20:14 <catalyst> ahf: like do we want to make sure we don't lose coverage for things that we're incidentally doing only on macOS that we could be doing elsewhere
17:20:21 <ahf> i guess the question here is "does anybody think that is a bad idea?"
17:20:31 <nickm> (please tell me if so?)
17:20:38 <ahf> catalyst: yep, that makes sense
17:21:53 <ahf> Should we auto-close old pull requests on GitHub?
17:22:05 <nickm> there's a ticket for that and some discussion happening there
17:22:10 <ahf> i have thought about that before. i think this could be a good idea. i have seen other projects have bots do that
17:22:15 <ahf> yes, it's #33629
17:22:25 <nickm> folks should comment there if they have opinions
17:22:26 <nickm> I think some of these discussion items are from last week?
17:22:36 <ahf> plausible
17:22:40 <ahf> the next two are
17:22:44 <nickm> (should we auto-delete discussion items after sending updates?)
17:22:51 <ahf> yes
17:23:03 <ahf> Volunteers need help. Please help them when you are around.Maybe we should have times of day when different people are responders, and expectatios of who helps
17:23:06 <ahf> is new for sure
17:23:11 <nickm> yes
17:23:30 <nickm> I think teor (and me to a lesser extent) are answering a lot of volunteers on the channels
17:23:50 <nickm> I would say "everybody please remember to help with this"...
17:24:03 <nickm> but in the past, making things "everybody's job" means everybody hopes somebody else will do it
17:24:25 <nickm> I wonder if there is some way to "assign" this work fairly like we do for reviews
17:24:32 <nickm> something to think about if anyone has ideas
17:24:57 <jnewsome> something we've done in past project I've been on is "on duty" rotations
17:25:02 <ahf> especially right now where a lot of people are coming in to ask about things because of outreachy it is good to help out with this
17:25:18 <ahf> i don't think there will be as many as there is right now in the future, so doing a bit extra there is good
17:25:25 <ahf> and also be helpful to people who PM you
17:25:41 <ahf> i have no idea if i get more of those because my nick starts with a, but i have gotten a few of them in the past 2 weeks or so
17:25:42 <catalyst> ahf: do we know what times of day are the peaks for questions from new folks?
17:25:46 <nickm> also just because somebody says "hey teor" or "hey nickm" doesn't mean that we are the only ones who can help them :)
17:26:03 <nickm> it just means that we are the ones who helped them most recently
17:26:06 <ahf> catalyst: i think from 15 UTC or something like that? i have the feeling it is a lot of US TZ times?
17:27:00 <ahf> jnewsome: yeah, we have had rotating duties before in the network team
17:27:16 <ahf> but we ended up getting rid of a lot of them a while ago and turning them into more static roles
17:28:20 <ahf> nickm: that is a very good point
17:28:34 <ahf> if people ask for other folks on irc, but you can answer the question, please just feel free to
17:28:41 <ahf> the other person can always follow up when they are around
17:29:08 <catalyst> i seem to recall that some new volunteers are most active on weekends and nights in their local time? or people notice otherwise?
17:29:21 <jnewsome> maybe this is too big of a quiestion for this meeting - but have we considered other support channels?
17:29:34 <jnewsome> e.g. if there was a support ticket, someone could pick up where things left off and be able to read the context
17:29:35 <nickm> we also get questions on trac and sometimes the mailing lists
17:29:40 <ahf> catalyst: yes, there are more activity in the weekends for sure
17:29:58 <nickm> catalyst: there's definitely weekend demand.  since i'm at home all the time now, i allocated a little time each day  to check for questions.
17:30:01 <ahf> jnewsome: there have been alternatives to irc up before
17:30:11 <catalyst> maybe we need to schedule weekend rotations. but that might take a while to arrange and ramp up
17:31:06 <nickm> yeah. and it's not something I'd want to ask anybody to do
17:31:12 <jnewsome> maybe we should try to steer people harder toward those other channels? irc/chat is kind of the worst support channel in a lot of ways; the only advantage is (potentially) immediate gratification
17:31:12 <ahf> it would work right now, but as soon as we are no longer stuck to our homes i think it will collapse
17:31:22 <amar94> Hi all
17:31:33 <ahf> hello amar94
17:31:38 <nickm> hi amar94 ! Are you here for the network team meting?
17:32:04 <amar94> Hi yes, I was chating with ggus so he invited me join here
17:32:14 <ahf> cool
17:32:15 <ahf> !
17:32:19 <ahf> what can we help you with?
17:32:32 <gaba> catalyst: more than rotations I think it woudl be useful if everybody allocates a little time each day for this.
17:32:49 <amar94> I offered to help to org. this year, will have more time to spend here
17:33:15 <ahf> amar94: you do programming in C and/or python and/or rust? or help in general with non-programming things?
17:33:38 <nickm> (what's next on the meeting agenda?)
17:33:42 <amar94> yeah, I do haskell for now and oracle tech.
17:33:50 <ahf> we have nothing more on the agenda
17:33:58 <ahf> amar94: can we move to #tor-dev and then we can end the boring parts of our meeting?
17:34:00 <amar94> have experience with rust
17:34:01 <ahf> would that be OK?
17:34:16 <nickm> ok: reminder to  please vote on the pending policy proposals if you haven't alrady
17:34:19 <nickm> *already
17:34:20 <nickm> and that's all from me
17:34:21 <amar94> sure, everything is ok
17:34:25 <ahf> amar94: let's chat in there
17:34:27 <ahf> #endmeeting