Meeting 2015 11 16

Agenda items

• webrender vs. servo wpt/css tests will have different expectations (jack)
• Which intermittents are hurting the most right now? (larsberg)
• Feelings on mailing list vs. GH issues vs. discourse (e.g., http://internals.rust-lang.org/) (larsberg)
• Update libc to 0.2, use std::os::raw where possible. (Simon)

Attending

• jdm, larsberg, manish, mbrueck, ms2ger, till, edunham, bholley, brson, simonsapin

Last week

• Team updates: http://statusupdates.dev.mozaws.net/project/servo

webrender vs. servo WPT

• larsberg: Table until next week or the mailing list? jgraham & gw talked about it...
• jdm: Yes.

Intermittents

• larsberg: I want to tackle some of our intermittent test failures. Do we know which are hurting the most now?
• jdm: It recently got much better, but not for great reasons: In my attempts to debug the worst one https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/7787, it has become less reproducible on the build machines, without really helping show where exactly the problem was. Additionally the WebGL tests on all the machines were so awful that we don't actually run any of them anymore.
• larsberg: I'm going to work on the IPC-channel one today, and then I'll look at WebGL.
• bholley: I landed a patch to load web font synchronously. Doesn't mean the bugs aren't there, but just are more reproducibly passing.
• mbrubeck: eefriedman also fixed (two weeks ago) one of our webfont issues that caused a couple of top ones. Awesome. https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/8257
• larsberg: Yeah, great catch on the concurrent events there!

Mailing list

• larsberg: It's been suggested that we should use discourse instead of our mailing list, particularly for threaded discussion. Any opinions? Experience from the Rust team?
• brson: In Rust we started moving off the mailing list and moved to a single discourse forum, about a year ago, and there was a lot of huffing and puffing from mailing list proponents which worried us a little, but eventually it blew over and for the most part people came along with us. Later we split the forum into "users" and "internals" and I was worried about splitting the userbase. I'm still on the fence about that decision. A lot of discussion already ends up on Reddit instead of our forums, and the users forum is a bit under-utilized. In terms of the infrastructure of the forums, I'm very happy with it. It has great features and is very customizable. The thing I'm very happy about is for long-running threads, like project coordination threads. We often have several of these going on at once, and you can do things like update the first post and use it to hold the current status. We do also have a use case for a wiki and might want to bring the wiki back.
• jdm: Any problems with spam?
• brson: Our admin setup is not very well thought out. I put my email in when we set it up, so I believe that makes me the admin. Sometimes I get an email that "something happened" and I go look at it. There's a spam filter.
• mbrubeck: All of the moderators have access to the spam stuff, so that's myself and the rust-moderation team. It's the akismet one used on wordpress. Does have some false positives, but pretty rare. Also no that much actual spam. Very little moderation is required (great community!). I do fix up formatting for markdown sometimes, but that's about it.
• brson: Discourse advertises their compatibility with e-mail, but it seems buggy and not something to rely on.
• mbrubeck: There are some accesibility problems; it uses one of those JS frontends that can work somewhat with a screen reader, but does not work well with braille terminals (compared to the mailing list). You can reply to threads via the e-mail frontend, but starting a new one is hard.
• bholley: How hard for making announcements / call for feedback.
• edunham: Depends on their personal e-mail settings.
• brson: I get a digest that I ignore every week.
• mbrubeck: You can mark a thread as "Sticky" which highlights it and pins it to the top of the page, which helps for people who visit the web site.
• larsberg: I get a daily digest, and just interact through email.
• bholley: Part of it is whether it matters to send out announcements. Easy to solicit feedback via mailing lists.
• larsberg: Honestly one of my biggest concerns is making sure we continue to get feedback from people like dbaron, roc, etc.
• edunham: Suggest we do not solely move to github issues. There are discussions on discourse/mailing list that don't really work in issues.
• brson: One other concern about discourse is archiving. Our data is all on their servers. For Rust we care about this a lot. We don't ever want this data to disappear.
• larsberg: Please let me know if you have any opinions not voiced here. We're not making any changes immediately, so it's not urgent.

libc upgrade

• larsberg: There were some changes to the libc bindings crate that especially affect ARM platforms. To solve them we're going to try to move everything (67 crates!) to libc 0.2. We're also working on the next rustup which will let us move to the official Rust nightlies instead of my hand-rolled snapshots.
• SimonSapin: The standard library has a module called std::os::raw that has c_char, etc. Where possible, we should use them instead of the ones from libc. Hopefully in some cases that will remove the dependency entirely, and hopefully in other cases it will just be more stable in the future.
• mbrubeck: I think bindgen uses libc currently - should we make that change?
• bholley: Do you maintain bindgen?
• larsberg: michaelwu is a co-maintainer and can land things for us. I believe he's planning to land all of his C++ changes upstream.
• till: I rebased them.
• SimonSapin: Should probably chat with acrichto about std::os::raw vs. libc.
• mbrubeck: I'll file an issue and CC him.

Note about E-Easy issues

• larsberg: Check out the charts on twitter! http://imgur.com/fE6PcS8 http://imgur.com/baDkWZ1 (via psd). They're going super well, which means that both the issues are great and the first setup/build/run of Servo is going really well. Thanks to everybody for supporting that!
• till: A contributor from the Berlin community said that they go away too quickly!
• bholley: Do we have assignee?
• larsberg: We can't assign bugs to people who aren't members of the GitHub organization. People comment when they want to work on an issue, and we have an "Assigned" label.
• edunham: We could potentially have highfive add the Assigned label when people say a specific phrase (and give instructions for this in each issue).
• till: One thing I want to mention, since I'm in Berlin and there's a Mozilla community meetup in a few weeks. I'm going to give a talk on Servo/Rust and I will also do a workshop session where I'll try to steer people through the process of setting things up and starting to contribute. Ideally I'll batch up a few easy issues "off the books" for people to solve there. I'll talk to people about that sometime next week.
• larsberg: Unless you have really good bandwidth, you might want to do what we did for the Servo training is to clone and build the Servo repo. Skia in particular is hundreds of megabytes to clone from GitHub.
• till: This is a two-day event with talks on Saturday and workshops on Sunday, so on Saturday we want to circulate a USB drive with all the necessary files and instructions.
• bholley: Or you could give people instructions to clone it overnight.
• till: Sure. I want to remove as much friction as possible. We have time on Saturday we can use to help people.