Notes taken at the GLibC BoF Attendees: 95 Pre-meeting: changelog transition similar to GCC model worked well for glibc. Or rather vice versa, glibc came first, w/ gnulib's purely automated generation, plus quirks file. ChangeLogs are autogenerated on release branches. RMS okayed no manual changelog entries at all. Instead, detailed git commit messages. Release plans: two releases in 2021. Key enabler: patch review. * Florian convinced Carlos patch review is even more important than bz. * Patch review challenge from last year: 100 reviews/day .... actual range 10ish/day * 554 community reviews in last year * patchwork running on new sourceware.org, makes it easier to find unreviewed patches * Maybe organize regular meetings/schedules for intensive review sessions? * Online, conversational chat driven coordination a possibility? * Preferential focus / feedback on new contributors is important to welcoming atmosphere. * Automated CI builds from patchwork would be useful to verify non-regression. * Distros should ship git-pw clients. Sourceware mailman complications: * mail header munging is made necessary by internet anti-spam processing, it is a trade-off * patchwork submissions bypass some of this, since they bypass mailman reflector processing Other experiences with patchwork-CI integration * Laura Abbott on kernel experiences: CKI project, see also testing/fuzzing microconference * The very volume of patches for the kernel started hitting performance limits of patchwork/CI * Ordering / dependencies between patches has been a problem * glibc volume is smaller * Florian: volume is smaller, but conflicts in Makefiles, symbol lists occur, ergo git merge conflicts; could be automated, not inherently difficult, just a build system change (not fun) * What kind of CI cycle time is good enough? glibc: 70 targets => 3 hours * Obscure architecture failures happen * Some machines take much much longer to run through tests (scarcity / speed), a few hours latency mostly ok, esp. if the load is borne by other machines. Other topics: * Florian has a bunch coming down the pipe. XXX with 30-40 patches, libpthread removal, startup changes for security mode code vs. static linking, tunables, many cross-architecture changes ideally coordinated in one batch * HJ on ISA level tagging for shared libraries, Florian points to ld.so.cache