Assessment of the iteration that has ended

We had planned to work on the following issues for the previous iteration, and finished them:

• Subplot issue 221 – Command line tool has insufficient logging
• Subplot issue 282 Release Subplot with improved Rust support
• Subplot issue 254 Make release 0.3.2 or 0.4.0 of Subplot

Repository review

We reviewed the open issues, merge requests, and CI pipelines for all the projects in the Subplot group on gitlab.com.

The subplot repository

There were 50 open issues and we opted to review them all as we are at the start of a goal.

• Subplot issue 16 Error messages should say where in the source the problem was found we removed the someday-maybe label and brought it into the goal.
• Subplot issue 96 Error for “do not understand binding” should say in which file… we brought into the goal.
• Subplot issue 207 Release process is too manual, … we decided to close which also resulted in us closing Subplot issue 218
• Subplot issue 220 Generated Rust test programs are hard to debug we close to close because it’s much easier to debug these now, and if we need to improve matters in the future we can make a new issue with the specific improvements we suggest.
• Subplot issue 223 lib/runcmd lacks a generic “given an installed {name}” step Lars added some commentary, as we continue to try and work out what this truly means for us.
• Subplot issue 227 Doesn’t support a workflow where codegen is used from build.rs is actually now done, so we closed this.
• Subplot issue 235 The Subplot subplot (subplot.md) is too long we removed the someday-maybe label and brought it into the goal
• Subplot issue 255 Should use “diagram” instead of “graph” for plantuml etc we removed someday-maybe, assigned it to Lars, and brought it tentatively into the iteration
• Subplot issue 256 Lacks way to mark an embedded file as being OK that it’s not used in a scenario we removed someday-maybe, assigned it to Daniel, and brought it tentatively into the iteration
• Subplot issue 260 Could use pandoc-filter-diagram crate we closed because goal 3 will be moving us away from pandoc-ast and so the crate is not relevant for Subplot
• Subplot issue 276 Lacks an HTTP client step library we added the someday-maybe label.
• Subplot issue 281 Parsing markdown with Pandoc doesn’t handle basedir will need revisiting when we’ve redone our internal data formatting etc. but we added the bug, and docgen labels, and brought it into the goal.

We then reexamined Subplot issue 246 Split off document YAML metadata into a separate file and created Subplot issue 283 to encapsulate just the YAML split out which we assigned to Lars and tentatively added to the iteration.

There are no open merge requests.

There were open, old branches:

• docgen-cmark – we will keep this until the next goal is finished

CI pipelines are OK.

The subplot-web repository

There were no open issues, no open merge requests, no extra branches, and no CI enabled.

The subplot-container-images repository

There was one open issue.

• subplot-container-images #2 – There is no Docker image for using Subplot
  • we’re not going to work on this until we stop making breaking changes

There were no open merge requests, no extra branches, and the latest run of CI was successful. (That’s the run that was automatically triggered recently.)

Discussion and decisions

Recurring agenda items

• Subplot issue 119 – Subplot is in not in Debian unstable
  • we’re not going to work on this now
• Subplot issue 272 – Migrate project to issue-based iteration meetings
  • we’re not going to work on this now
• Subplot issue 273 – Perform whole-codebase review and cleanup
  • we agreed that during goal 3 we may end up making MRs which are related to this, and that we hope by the end of goal 3 to have reviewed at least a large part of the codebase.

Reaching out for feedback

We won’t be reaching out for feedback until goal 3 is done. We didn’t open issue for this, to avoid naming people in public.

New iteration

Previous goal

The current development goal is:

Subplot provides a set of libraries with identical capabilities in each of the supported languages. Python remains a supported language. Rust is promoted to supported-language status. Subplot will be tested with all supported languages. In addition, any quality of life improvements which can be done shall be done. This goal will be considered complete when a release of Subplot has been made with the unified language handling support complete.

This is represented as label goal::2 in the GitLab.com issue tracker.

Current goal

The current development goal is:

Subplot is altered to treat a YAML document as the root of any subplot document, permitting multiple markdown files to be joined into a single scenario set or output document. We remove our dependency on Pandoc’s AST for internal document representation, and support a better range of document metadata as a result. We will use marked data types where possible to permit better provenance information in error and warning messages; and we will strive to reenable the reference tests such that we can make a statement to the effect that post goal 3, we do not intend to make further breaking changes to the input formats or primary behaviours of Subplot.

This is represented as label goal::3 in the GitLab.com issue tracker.

Issues for this iteration

We collected issues for this iteration in Subplot milestone 48.

• Subplot issue 283 YAML metadata is not in its own file, assigned to Lars
• Subplot issue 256 Lacks way to mark an embedded file as being OK that it’s not used in a scenario, assigned to Daniel
• Subplot issue 255 Should use “diagram” instead of “graph” for plantuml etc?, assigned to Lars

Releases

We decided not to make a release for this iteration

Any other business

Gitlab approved open source project

We jumped through the hoops to request the gitlab open source project privileges.

Daniel is the contact for this, we’ll see how it goes. Gitlab say it can up to ten days before a decision is reached.

Actions

None.

Meeting participants

• Lars Wirzenius
• Daniel Silverstone