4.4 Sprint

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1. Date and location

The sprint will be held from September 29--October 1, 2017 at Facebook Dublin in Ireland.

The address is 4 Grand Canal Square, Grand Canal Dock, Dublin 2, Ireland (Google Maps).

For a visa letter, please contact ‎Andras Belokosztolszki‎ (andrasbelo AT fb DOT com). Please include full name (as in passport), DoB, passport number, issue date, expiry date, exact dates of travel, nationality, country of residence, ideally passport copy.

1.1. Agenda

The Agenda Available as a Google Spreadsheet

Friday will include intros, presentations about the state of the Mercurial project, and "Vision Statements" about possible futures of the project, followed by breakout sessions to discuss topics more in depth.

Saturday is primarily dedicated to additional breakout sessions.

Sunday will focus on writing some code based on ideas discussed in the sprint, and then ending with presentations about cool prototypes, new functionality, and similar tech talks.

We need additional people to sign up for Vision Statements and Tech Talks!

2. Arrival logistics

Please make sure you fill in the attendee list below. 24 hours before the event the badges will be requested. At the Facebook office we will have the "Live Lounge" room on the 6th floor. WiFi, AV and Flipboard will be available. Any issues on the day ping me on (andrasbelo AT fb DOT com).

2.1. Attendance

Everyone is welcome, from core developers to aspiring contributors. Attending a Mercurial sprint is usually a good way to kickstart your contributions as you'll have a large amount of help available for 3 full days.

3. Sponsors

We need funds to pay flights and hotel for a few independent contributors.

Recent sprints sponsoring budgets were around $10,000.

Sponsoring Companies:

• Apastron Co

• Google

• Please offer your sponsoring

Sponsor point of contact: E-mail mercurial-steering AT mercurial-scm.org

4. Meals

Having food delivered for lunch is usually preferred as it helps us get back to work quicker. We usually go out for dinner to help people cool off after a day of work.

5. Possible Topics

Important things we want to discuss: (add your own)

5.1. Windows Testing

AugieFackler had problems during our last set of security patches validating things on Windows. He'd like to work with someone to document the steps required to go from an empty Windows VM to a working testsuite for development purposes.

5.2. narrowhg

Recently several people have started kicking the tires on narrowhg. I think we've got a subset of narrowhg that could be fused with the recently-imported sparse code and landed in core. I'd like to discuss this further.

5.3. Mononoke

Facebook is working on a distributed Mercurial server in Rust. sid0 can do a status update: where we're going, what it's meant for, and what can be useful to the broader Mercurial community.

5.4. Rust

Seriously consider using Rust for new native code.

5.5. Review Tooling

• Phabricator. It's probably nice for contributors and usable thanks to the new dashboard. But still the email interface seems plain useless for me (yuja) and it's painful to quickly scan what's going on.

• How to increase review particpation

5.6. GUIs for enterprise deployment

Google would like to deploy a recommended GUI for engineers to use, but all the available options seem to have some shortcoming (for instance, many bundle their own hg and only work with that). We don't have the bandwidth to invest in fully developing a GUI, but would like to discuss adapting an existing one for use in controlled deployments.

5.7. hg show

• Move to core?

• Turn views into actual commands (like hg swork)?

5.8. style guide changes/improvements

• CAPITAL_WITH_UNDERSCORE constants?

• CapitalizedCase classes?

• camelCase locals? underscore_locals?
• Full PEP8 adoption?
• """Normalized docblock rules"""?
• Appoint a "style czar" to make decisions and avoid endless bikesheds?

5.9. Support for long paths on Windows

• Should we automatically prepend //?/ to all absolute paths?
• How Python3 migration affects these plans

5.10. Backup file madness (`foo.orig`)

• There's a can of worms surrounding backup file names:

  • They can clobber tracked files that happened to be called something ending in .orig (issue 5685)

  • scmutil.origpath uses absolute filenames and doesn't support windows well (comments in https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D680)

• What can we do to resolve these problems?

5.11. In-repo config files

• Allow per-repo revsets, templates, command aliases, etc defined via in-repo files.

• PoC with discussion https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D98

• Need to hash out various security and UX concerns

5.12. Sparse in core

• Do we need a new dirstate concept to represent "elided" files? e.g. how do you purge files outside the sparse profile?
• UI bikeshedding
• Path to non-experimental
• profile-specific branches?
• remappings in working directory?

5.13. hg workspaces

• Demo the prototype 'hg workspaces' extension. An alternative to local bookmarks

5.14. hg restack

• Discuss the path to upstreaming hg restack (i.e. similar to hg evolve)
• Getting hash preservation into core for the 4.5 release

5.15. Dirstate

• Refactors needed for easier integration with FUSE filesystems
• Refactors needed for better scaling

5.16. Sparse/Lazy changelog

• Refactoring the changelog in H1 to not require all of history

5.17. remotenames

• Go over the plan for upstreaming the remotenames extension

5.18. topics/named branches

• Pulkit is working on improving topics and trying to upstream some good ideas from topics to named branches.

5.19. Corporate self-review

• What community standard should we have around a company's employees reviewing their coworker's code?
• Augie touched on this in his speech -- be aware of biases
• Shall companies have directories inside the codebase where they can play with in-progress ideas before getting "full review"?

5.20. Topic 1

• sub topic 1.a

• sub topic 1.b

6. Sprint Notes

General overview (drop the anti spam part): https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/sprint-hg4.4-NOSPAMREMOVETHATLASTPAST

The table below is an attempt to gather written summary of discussion