Review of actions from last meeting

• There were no actions. The action about Subplot issue 22 was a mistake.

Review of the iteration that has ended

Subplot milestone 30 was for this iteration. We closed all issues picked for the iteration:

• Subplot issue 194—trial release
• Subplot issue 195—./check to tail logs on failure
• Subplot issue 197—lib/daemon.py to break long lines in log
• Subplot issue 199—honour JAVA_HOME for Pandoc
• Subplot issue 200—sort lists in metadata output
• Subplot issue 201—move bindings-ubm into tests
• Subplot issue 203—document build.rs

All issues tagged current-goal are now closed, except Subplot issue 125, which is the tracker issue for getting people to try Subplot.

Review of the repositories

We reviewed the subplot-web and subplot-container-images repositories, and there were no open issues, no open merge requests, no extra branches, and no unsuccessful CI pipelines. The subplot repository had no open merge requests, no unnecessary branches, and the pipeline for the main branch was successful. There is one work-in-progress branch for changing the Subplot subplot to use Rust instead of Python for step implementations. All good: no pending cleanup work from this iteration.

Goal for this iteration

We discussed the goal for this iteration, which is to get a few people actually try Subplot. We reformulated Subplot issue 125 accordingly. We think all code changes are ready for the first outside users, so the work we want to do is to make a release for them to try, and then be ready to react to any feedback quickly.

Issue review

We reviewed all issues this time. Most issues are not relevant to near-term goals, but to manage that better, we created a label for "goal two", after the current goal ("goal one"). Goal one is about getting others to try Subplot; goal two is to make Subplot nicer to use. Once goal one is done, we'll rename the current-goal tag to goal:1, and the goal:2 tag to current-goal.

We added the following issues to the goal:2 tag:

• Subplot issue 20—conditional scenarios
• Subplot issue 22—location of helper binaries
• Subplot issue 74—environment variables for Bash
• Subplot issue 120—list all matching bindings
• Subplot issue 190—test suite is slow
• Subplot issue 188—libraries using regex patterns
• Subplot issue 196—Python runner stops on first failure
• Subplot issue 198—unified Subplot libraries

We decided to pick one difficult issue for each goal. For goal two that is Subplot issue 20.

We closed Subplot issue 154] as hopefully done, and Subplot issue 191 as unwanted.

After the review there were 33 open issues.

Current goal

Our current goal is to get Subplot the software and project into such a shape that we feel confident that we can ask a few people to give it a proper try. This requires for Subplot to have releases that are easy to install, tolerably easy to use, and to have at least some rudimentary documentation aimed at beginners.

Plan for next iteration

We created Subplot milestone 31, with two issues:

• Subplot issue 125—get people to try Subplot
• Subplot issue 204—create release

Other business

We discussed using GitLab issues for iteration meeting agenda. For now, we'll stick to what we have, since it works for the two of us, but as soon as others want to join, we'll re-evaluate. Using issues, or possibly merge requests, might be useful if contributors aren't in time zones close to the European one.

We discussed using cargo release to simplify the release process, but decided to evaluate it in more detail later.

We discussed release cadence, and decided to start each iteration by making a release, unless there is something to prevent a release. Making the release at the start of an iteration means it's less hurried, and so more likely to be correct. We also decided to automate the release process as we go along.

Actions

No actions.