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Servo Technical Steering Committee Meeting

Date: 2021-02-12 Location: Zoom

Agenda

  • Approve 2020-12 meeting minutes

  • Report on the Servo Project board and budget

  • Report from the Infrastructure subcommittee

  • Servo workshop/conference? Meeting chair?

  • Next TSC meeting: 2021-04

  • Any Other Business

Minutes

attending: ajeffrey, cbrewster, cybai, manishearth, mrobinson, simonsapin

ajeffrey: Any objections to the previous meetings minutes.

ajeffrey: No objections.

ajeffrey: We have a board now. The end of March will be the first board meeting. This means that there is also a budget. Previously, money coming in was from individual donations. With the funding board we have a proper budget now. Does the TSC have an opinion about budget things? Formally this is all managed by the board, but we are allowed to express opinions to them.

simonsapin: Other than CI, we've also talked about having someone part-time maintaining infrastructure.

ajeffrey: What would that position look like? Would it be a part-time technical community manager? Would this role be looking out for the CI and steering the PR process -- making sure they don't disappear?

simonsapin: Yeah, something like that.

ajeffrey: Any other thoughts...ideas for sensible things to spend money on? The actual decision-making process is going to be done by the board. We can give opinions to them and figure out if there is slack in the budget for things. My suspicion is that from the Linux Foundation there are going to be high-priority items that they want us to pay for. They also often have a part-time project manager and that person's role is often around what the LF calls outreach, but to other board members rather than the technical community. Marketing in a for-profit enterprise. Does it make sense for those two roles to be the same person?

simonsapin: A few weeks ago someone asked "How can I support the project?" I could have sent them to that person.

ajeffrey: For the moment we are filling that role, but having someone in that role would be useful. In terms of the process, are we okay with just providing input into the board or do we want a join subcommittee that roughs out a budget and send it back to the board? Does anyone here have strong feelings about budget and want to have their input recognized?

manishearth: Leaving it up to the board sounds good with some opinions sent from us to the board.

simonsapin: I think that's fine. If we [the TSC] later have opinions, we can change things.

ajeffrey: Right. It's not set in stone. The initial budget is drawn up in March, probably a 6 month budget -- till about the start of 2022. The other thing is we should think about is if we should do any messaging around having a funding charter. The LF likes to make announcements about a bunch of board members in one go instead of piecemeal. The LF would probably like us to do informal outreach. The full membership is fairly expensive (~100k), but there are other kinds of membership which still have input into the board. So spreading the message to anyone who might want to support servo might be a useful thing.

simonsapin: What is the message and process?

ajeffrey: The general message is to support servo and the process is available to look at. For people who want to provide support, they can do it through the LF.

looking at "Participation Agreement" linked from servo.org

simonsapin: It says "review draft" right now.

ajeffrey: Apparently this is a typical lawyer thing that means this is the draft that lawyers should view. This is the draft that a company would sign. We should probably link this from servo.org.

simonsapin: It's already on the homepage. It links to the PDF.

ajeffrey: We should make it easy to find the funding agreement on the servo.org page.

ACTION ITEM: put link on servo.org

ajeffrey: Report from infrastructure subcommittee.

simonsapin: I have nothing to report. I can only repeat what Josh has written in Zulip. There was some work related to SpiderMonkey.

ajeffrey: The other item is looking into Github actions.

simonsapin: Josh has done some work looking into GitHub actions and making servo compile on different platforms. I don't know the details of where that's at right now.

ajeffrey: It seems like that is on the backburner right now, because getting rid of Python2 has taken priority?

simonsapin: Is Python2 blocking GitHub Actions?

ajeffrey: Not sure, but the SpiderMonkey upgradeseems to have happened. I r+'d it, but it hasn't merged yet. I think that was the last bit of Python2, but I don't know if that was a requirement to move over to GitHub actions or unrelated housekeeping. As far as I can tell, is that Josh's general feeling is that it looks like this is all going to go through, which means that we'd be off of TaskCluster. Deadline for that is May.

simonsapin: Do we have an actual deadline or is it in the air?

ajeffrey: Unclear. I'm still working on the basis that it is May. I haven't heard anything to the contrary.

simonsapin: We are now paying a new, lower price per month for the MacStadium CI.

mrobinson: Confirms name of CI company.

simonsapin: clarifies We rent some Mac hardware from them.

ajeffrey: The process for the AWS bill is now in place. We are currently at $120 a month, which isn't a huge amount of money when the board is in place.

simonsapin: You are handling the payment for that?

ajeffrey: Yes. The difficult part was setting up the buffer between the bank account and AWS. AWS will just keep charging if you mess up the CI configuration. Very easy to lose a bunch of money this way. I'm pretty confident that won't happen at this point. There's a whole cycle that happens now with Expensify, etc.

simonsapin: Now that we do have a finance board, this is all easier?

ajeffrey: Yeah, we can get a servo project credit card for instance and we can use that for AWS. Other infrastructure stuff?

ajeffrey: Next topic: LF wants us to have a meeting...a workshop or conference or something similar. The main issue is whether or not there is someone from our end who can chair this...do the presentation/paper process: a CFP and then an approval process.

simonsapin: You mean organizing a brand new conference?

ajeffrey: It would be a satellite event of another LF conference. They typically have these. A fair amount would be done by LF, but we'd handle the technical aspects. We'd coordinate with all the speakers. Anyone here that says, "Yes, that sounds like a good idea and want to donate some of their time?"

no volunteers

ajeffrey: I'll get back to the LF and say there is no champion for that here.

ajeffrey: Next TSC meeting: The next meeting is in April. Any changes that anyone would like to make to the current every-two-months cadence?

silence

ajeffrey: Any other business?

silence

ajeffrey: Closing meeting. Thank you.

Action Items

  • Update link to funding agreement on servo.org. Make the link easy to find and ensure that is links to the correct document.