Subplot → blog → 2022 → 07 → 31 → Iteration planning: July 31 – August 13
  1. Actions from last time
  2. Assessment of the iteration that has ended
  3. Discussion
    1. Lars’ progress on subplot#283
    2. Check through licence terms we accept and confirm we’re okay with them all.
    3. EuroRust in Octber in Berlin
    4. The gitlab.com hosting situation
    5. Repository review
    6. Recurring items issues
  4. Goals
    1. Goal 3: Current goal
    2. Goal 4: Planned
  5. Plan for new iteration
    1. Actions
  6. Meeting participants

Actions from last time

  • Daniel to draft a response to Hillel Wayne. Lars will review. DONE Email reply was sent, Saturday July 30th.
  • Daniel to research how to have dependencies only for binaries produced by a crate, but not the library part of the crate. Some research done, an issue is to be opened on Cargo
  • Lars to upgrade his roadmap crate to use clap version 3, instead of structopt. DONE as 0.4.4

Assessment of the iteration that has ended

We extended, by mutual agreement on Matrix, this iteration was extended by two weeks.

We had chosen the following issues for this iteration:

  • web#3 – Document how we do meetings - DONE
  • subplot#283 – YAML metadata is not in its own file
    • Lars has made some progress
  • subplot#286 – Tests sometimes fail
    • Lars tried to reproduce, didn’t succeed, closed.
  • web#4 – Review FAQ
    • Daniel has made little progress on this, to be carried.
  • subplot#289 – Make release 0.4.2
    • Lars made the release, then made another release. Yay.
  • subplot#287 – Needs documentation for Rust step functions for implementing contexts
    • Daniel has made no progress here, to be carried.

We managed to complete three of these issues, and make progress on the non-issue based actions from last meeting. This is good.

We chose to carry all three open issues to the next iteration.

Discussion

Lars’ progress on subplot#283

We have two metadata structs at the moment. Rather than trying to find a unified version of these and then refactoring everything to use that, etc. etc. Lars realised there’s a reason why we have two. They serve different purposes. One represents the data that is serialised as YAML - the other represents the processed version of the metadata where things like bindings and implementations have been loaded in. Effectively raw metadata and processed metadata.

So today, Lars started to write a struct (MetadataFile) which is raw metadata. And then added functions to the Document struct impls, to deal with these. Inherently this works OK, but we cannot use these for subplot-filter as that works with pandoc json. We think that Lars is the only user of subplot-filter and so we agreed to drop that binary from the crate, thereby simplifying matters for this refactoring.

Check through licence terms we accept and confirm we’re okay with them all.

Assuming all are good (e.g. the unicode licence we had to accept recently) we should write a statement about them in our README or some similar document.

We reviewed the SPDX page for the Unicode license agreement and concluded together that we are:

  1. comfortable that it does not cause us problems
  2. comfortable that it will not cause problems for our users

As such, we see no need to worry about this licence.

We chose to be lazy and not update our README at this time.

EuroRust in Octber in Berlin

Daniel will be unavailable, but Lars in theory could attend, either in person or remotely.

We decided that Lars should give a talk, especially given we can always back down later if something bad happens.

We think it might mix into the Rust patterns and idioms, or the Rust case studies threads for EuroRust.

If we write a talk about how people should use Subplot; then we could use that thinking to also further the goal of defining the Subplot book.

The gitlab.com hosting situation

We reviewed the billing page for Subplot on gitlab.com. It all looks OK. We’re over the limit on seats, but it seems we can increase the seats for free.

We will review the billing page every iteration or two.

Repository review

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

Subplot Container Images

  • Open issues: 1
  • Merge requests: 0
  • Additional branches: 0
  • CI: OK, ran on Friday

subplot-web

  • Open issues: 1
  • Merge requests: 1
  • Additional branches: 0
  • CI: Ick, OK.

subplot

  • Open issues: 47, we reviewed all non-someday-maybe non-recurring issues:
    • subplot#287 we added the documentation and subplotlib labels
    • subplot#290 we assigned to Daniel and put into the iteration.
  • Merge requests: 0
  • Additional branches:
    • docgen-cmark, Lars is keeping this around for reference for future changes
  • CI: OK

Recurring items issues

There are some issues tagged recurring-agenda-item in the issue tracker, which we discuss in every iteration meeting.

  • subplot#119 – Subplot is in not in Debian unstable
    • we will work on reducing Subplot dependencies that aren’t already in Debian
  • subplot#272 – Migrate project to issue-based iteration meetings
    • we will try a “merge request based approach” instead, for a few iterations
    • Lars has tried this in the Obnam project and it has worked OK
    • Daniel agrees that so far this feels better.
    • We will try for another iteration or two, before deciding.
  • subplot#273 – Perform whole-codebase review and cleanup
    • we are not up to doing this yet

Goals

Goal 3: Current goal

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.

(Related issues on gitlab)

Goal 4: Planned

This goal is very likely to change. This is merely an initial sketch.

We’ll improve documentation and generally aim at making Subplot more plausibly usable by people outside of the Subplot project.

(Related issues on gitlab)

Plan for new iteration

We intend to work on the following issues:

  • subplot#290 – Cargo.toml: homepage URL is wrong
  • web#4 – Review FAQ
  • subplot#283 – YAML metadata is not in its own file
  • subplot#287 – Needs documentation for Rust step functions for implementing contexts

Actions

These are in addition to work on issues chosen for this iteration.

  • Daniel to open an issue with Cargo to discuss binary-only dependencies.
  • Lars to prepare an abstract and outline for a talk for EuroRust for us to review and make a decision about whether or not to submit at the next meeting.
  • Lars to use his new tool to produce a list of dependencies which Subplot has, which are not currently met by the packages in Debian.

Meeting participants

  • Daniel Silverstone
  • Lars Wirzenius