Actions from last time

• NOT DONE Daniel to open an issue with Cargo to discuss binary-only dependencies.
• SKIPPED 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.
  • see below
• DONE 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.
  • list was shared on the Matrix channel

Assessment of the iteration that has ended

We extended, by mutual agreement on Matrix, this iteration was extended by four weeks. Life and work intruded.

We had chosen the following issues for this iteration:

• DONE subplot#290 – Cargo.toml: homepage URL is wrong
• NOT DONE web#4 – Review FAQ
• DONE subplot#283 – YAML metadata is not in its own file
  • there is an MR: (Subplot merge request 287
• NOT DONE subplot#287 – Needs documentation for Rust step functions for implementing contexts

Lars feels good about having finally gotten the YAML metadata change done. However, we’ve slowed down with Subplot development and may need to do something. Most of the reason for slowing down is work and life requiring attention, but we don’t feel like want to give up on either.

Discussion

EuroRust in October in Berlin

Lars did not have time to propose a talk at the conference, and decided he can’t afford to go at his own expense, so Subplot won’t be at that EuroRust.

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 (this meeting)
• Additional branches: 1 (this meeting)
• CI: Ick, OK.

subplot

• Open issues: 52, we didn’t review issues much
• 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

Issues

We intend to work on the following issues:

• web#4 – Review FAQ
• subplot#287 – Needs documentation for Rust step functions for implementing contexts
• subplot#298 – Needs a release with the external YAML metadata file support

Actions

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

• Lars to look at what it would take to use the pulldown_cmark parser for Markdown, instead of Pandoc, and make a concrete proposal of how to approach that.
• Lars to discuss Subplot dependencies that aren’t packaged in Debian, and propose concrete steps to reduce the delta.
• Daniel to open an issue with Cargo to discuss binary-only dependencies.

Meeting participants

• Daniel Silverstone
• Lars Wirzenius