bpftrace office hours?

[BurntBrunch]

I'm opening this to gauge interest in a semi-regular development-oriented office hours meeting?

BPF office hours has been moderately successful and while we have a much smaller community here, I think it'd be nice to have a venue to meet and discuss topics in real time. For example, what people are working on short- and long-term, what roadblocks may exist for PRs, policy discussions, etc.

I personally would have found this useful initially and still have uses for it (and not only pinging for lands/reviews 😝).

@fbs, @viktormalik, @ajor, @danobi, you have the vast majority of contributions over the last two years, so your opinions count more!

[fbs]

Personally I do think it can be fun but I haven't done a lot for the project the past year(s?) so I doubt I add much value. It could be interesting to have a discussion on how get can move the project forward, decrease the latency on MRs and stuff

[dxuuu]

Hi Delyan. So I've been meaning to reply to this thread (funny how every time I think that I don't actually do it).

I think this is a good idea and would probably make development more fun. I've been less involved lately than I'd like so this would probably be a good motivator. There's been a bunch of things I've wanted to do (hello AOT scripts) but lost momentum on.

Not sure how timing would work out with the $DAYJOB but I can make a best effort attempt to show up.

[viktormalik]

Hi, this is a great idea, I'm certainly in. Especially recently, we've been falling behind with PR reviews, so this could speed things a little bit up. And could make the development more fun :-)

[BurntBrunch]

Great, let's figure out a time and I'll post a draft agenda to add to! (I'm thinking a 30 min slot to start with.)

Happy to work with people's time zones - can you give us a few time slots that work for you?
I'm in PST but I know a few people are GMT/east of GMT, so I'm happy with anything early morning - 6am+ PST is fine (2pm+ BST).

[viktormalik]

I'm in CET (GMT+1 in winter, GMT+2 in summer). I can do Tuesday any time until 5pm, (usually) Wednesday 4-5pm, or Friday 3-4pm.

[danobi]

I'm in MT (UTC-7 / UTC-6). After 6pm local time or before 10am local works best for me. But I am happy to be flexible

[fbs]

Same zone as @viktormalik, (amsterdam region)

[brendangregg]

I'm Sydney time (GMT+11ish) although I work odd hours to overlap with the US: Tues to Sat, 7am to 3pm. If it's not between midnight and 6am (1/4th of the clock) there's certainly a chance I can join. My main interest is tool development and capabilities.

[BurntBrunch]

Thanks, everyone, here are some time slots that match the constraints (@ajor, I think some of these would work for you but feel free to request changes):

1. Tuesdays (e.g. Nov 1) at: 8am PDT (me), 9am MDT (@danobi), 4pm CET (@fbs, @viktormalik), 2am AEDT
   a. Sorry @brendangregg, the constraints put Australia straight in the midnight-6am bucket, there's no time that works reasonably for Europe, Australia, and North America ☹️ We can maybe do separate calls and capture notes?
2. Wednesdays (e.g. Nov 2) at the same times as above.
3. Fridays (e.g. Nov 4) at: 7am PDT (me), 8am MDT (@danobi), 3pm CET (@fbs, @viktormalik), 1am AEDT

We should probably have the first meeting be 45 mins for intros and so on.
Logistically, we can use Zoom on a free account or the Meta instance (I have to check but we may able to record it there), or BBB if anyone has an instance.

▶️ Please vote for a day of the week and let me know if you can do next week or the week after.

Agenda-wise, I have the following items:

• Work in flight summary and path forward for myself
• Path to cleaning up the queues
  • Set up a policy (it can be automated via Actions) for auto-closing of issues and PRs
  • Enable auto-merge
• Path to easier onboarding of new contributors
  • Tests seem to be a common source of confusion, maybe a revamped CONTRIBUTING.md?
• Better CI (if we have time)

▶️ Again, please let me know what day of the week and first date you can do, as well as any agenda topics you may have!

[brendangregg]

Thanks, everyone, here are some time slots that match the constraints (@ajor, I think some of these would work for you but feel free to request changes):

1. Tuesdays (e.g. Nov 1) at: 8am PDT (me), 9am MDT (@danobi), 4pm CET (@fbs, @viktormalik), 2am AEDT
   a. Sorry @brendangregg, the constraints put Australia straight in the midnight-6am bucket, there's no time that works reasonably for Europe, Australia, and North America ☹️ We can maybe do separate calls and capture notes?

We do the BPF technical steering committee meeting across those three zones: Next one is 8am AEDT, 2pm PDT, 3pm MDT, 11pm CET. Could go back an hour. (Although mid year that slot is 6am AEDT, 1pm PDT, 2pm MDT, 10pm CET.) It puts India in the middle of the night, though, so we originally rotated between two time slots to get world coverage (not necessary for the current BSC makeup). I'd consider doing that here -- a rotating timeslot.

Also note some context: Some tech companies are pushing staff to come back to their Silicon Valley offices. I wouldn't want to create friction for remote work.

[viktormalik]

I'm ok with all the above 3 options, although might not be able to join on Wed, Nov 2.

[danobi]

All 3 times work for me. And I currently don't have any recurring work meetings for those times.

[ajor]

Any weekday would be good for me. Can make next week or later.

[BurntBrunch]

@brendangregg, the conflicting daytime constraints in both NA and European time zones make that time slot unavailable to 2-3 people.

We can certainly make an A/B schedule where we rotate to capture Sydney too but given that all recent contributors can make the above slots, I think we should go with one of them as the first meeting.

[danobi]

One topic in the back of my mind for a while now: merging the asciidoc man page and reference_guide.md.

[BurntBrunch]

Okay, unless there's serious objections, let's say the date and time for the first meeting is:

Tuesday Nov 1 at: 8am PDT (me), 9am MDT (@danobi), 3pm BST (@ajor), 4pm CET (@fbs, @viktormalik)
Duration: 45 min

This is the initial agenda just so we have a starting point, we can play it by ear:

1. Intros & top-of-mind work (10-ish mins)
2. Better docs (asciidoc -> reference_guide.md)
3. Queue cleanup (automation, auto-merge, etc)
4. Easier contributing (better docs, dev environment, CI, etc)

Link: https://meet.jit.si/moderated/cfcf1ea615c4dec1adbb5bd68aca2f9d687e0373c4a65cafcc66b95d4ed9a3f5

Zipped ics invite if you want it: bpftrace office hours.zip
(I'm also happy to email the invite to people, not sure if people actively use their github emails)

[xh4n3]

Hi guys, is this gonna be open to anyone, or it is kind of exclusive to core members? I really wish I could know what's going on in the community 😃

[danobi]

I definitely think it should be open to everyone.

[xh4n3]

That's great!

[BurntBrunch]

Given that it's all arranged on this thread, yeah, it's very much open to anyone :)

[BurntBrunch]

Summary of today's meeting (thanks for joining, everyone!):

Re: documentation and asciidoc:

• People generally update the reference guice or the man page but not both
• The man page tries to be more in-depth than the reference guide
• Merging them would save time and make them more consistent, ideally generated from the same docs
• We should ideally host it at bpftrace.org (@ajor also wants a new logo or at least not that logo!)
• @danobi will take a look at unifying the docs

Re: issues auto-closing

• Consensus is that it's a bad idea

Re: PRs auto-closing for staleness

• Maybe it's a good idea? Main argument is what it says about contribution velocity and state of maintenance.

Re: code owners file and getting tagged on PRs

• It was generally viewed as a good idea. The idea of the tooling picking one person to tag instead of all was floated but there's very few reviewers at the moment and it's not clear that would work better for bpftrace.

Re: auto-merging on green CI

• There were questions raised about whether you can approve but also request a mandatory review from someone else before the PR is merged.
• Follow-up: The state of github's auto-merge/PR review integration is as follows:
  • You can specify branch protection rules (CI is green and N approving reviews from people with write or admin bits) that are on by default. Auto-merge will trigger when all rules pass.
  • "Request changes" from reviewers can be bypassed by people with admin or write bits in order to speed things up if the reviewer who requested changes is not responsive.
  • You can disable auto-merge on an individual PR basis.
    • @ajor I think your concern about asking for more reviews is covered by this. Disable auto-merge for that PR, wait for more reviews, and the last reviewer can re-enable it or merge it directly.

Re: contribution bar is very high

• Maybe more pain should be tolerated on master in exchange to faster PR velocity?
• CI is a nightmare - flakiness, debugging, all of it.
  • Can we set it up so people can restart their CI on their own PRs?
  • Follow-up: The answer is no, you need the write permission to re-run jobs.

Re: next meeting

• Cadence at once a month seems acceptable.
• Should capture the other side of the globe.
• Some time before the holidays.
• I propose one of these time slots, depending on whether the GMT/CET folks want to join very early in their morning:
  • Tue Dec 6 8pm PST, 9pm MST, (Wed Dec 7) 3pm AEDT (middle of the night for GMT/CET)
  • Tue Dec 6 10pm PST, 11pm MST, (Wed Dec 7) 6am GMT, 7am CET, 5pm AEDT

[xh4n3]

Regarding the CI part, there are a few Github Actions can achieve what we need, maybe consider enabling them.
https://github.com/marketplace/actions/rerun-actions
https://github.com/marketplace/actions/close-stale-issues

[viktormalik]

Re: next meeting:

• 7am CET is completely fine with me, the other one (5am if I count correctly) would be more challenging (not impossible, though).

Re: contribution bar is very high:

• We mentioned several times that we should document "tips and tricks" for contributing. We already have some contribution guidelines, I'll look into them, expand them with what we discussed, and make them more visible.

[BurntBrunch]

Regarding the CI part, there are a few Github Actions can achieve what we need, maybe consider enabling them.

rerun-actions is maybe a good idea but doesn't help brand new contributors, unless we start tagging every PR with ok-to-test. Hm, need to think about this more.

I'll look into them, expand them with what we discussed, and make them more visible.

Thank you! I can document my dumb distrobox workflow too (the one where you delete the entrypoint from the Dockerfile, so the image is usable by distrobox).

[BurntBrunch]

Hi folks, I got laid off today, so my involvement here is probably not going to continue. I have a lot of ideas and maybe I'll find a company who'd hire me to work on them. Until then, however, I think I'll step away from tech for a bit.

Sorry for the wild roller coaster ride.

[viktormalik]

So sorry to hear that Delyan! Wish you all the best in your next journey and if you ever start missing tech, we'll be more than happy to have you here :-)

And thanks for bringing the fresh energy to this project!

[viktormalik]

Hi @fbs, @ajor, @danobi (and others, too)!

Unfortunately, since Delyan left, the maintainer activity in this project has dropped significantly. People are still opening issues and PRs, though, and while I'm able to review most of them at the moment (with @fbs responding to issues and questions, thanks for that!), there's a couple of tasks that I'd need help from other maintainers. The most important would be to review my PRs, there's already several of them and I don't want to merge anything without a proper review.

I'm aware that all of you have bpftrace as a side-project that you do in your free time so I just wanted to ask if I there's anything I could do to help getting you back (if you want to come back to this project at all). I felt like these regular meetings were a good mean to stay involved in the community, so I would gladly take over their organization, if you think that they would add some value.

Thanks for the opinions!

[fbs]

yeah lets have another meeting :)

[dxuuu]

Hi sorry, I missed the notification. I'm open to more meetings. I'll try to start making regular passes on the PRs again

[ajor]

More meetings sound good to me :)

I'm also going to be doing some work on bpftrace as part of my job now, so I'll be more active here on GitHub in the future too

[viktormalik]

Great, so let's have a meeting the next week.

Time slot

If you timezones haven't changed, I suggest one of these:

• Option 1: Monday (April 3) 9am MDT (@danobi), 4pm BST (@ajor), 5pm CEST (me and @fbs)
• Option 2: Tuesday (April 4) 8am MDT (@danobi), 3pm BST (@ajor), 4pm CEST (me and @fbs)
• Option 3: Wednesday (April 5) 9am MDT (@danobi), 4pm BST (@ajor), 5pm CEST (me and @fbs)

Let me know if any of these suits you. I personally prefer options 2 and 3.

Agenda

So far, I have 3 points in mind:

1. Queue cleanup - what can we do better?
2. Overview of significant ongoing work
   a. libbpf as a main part of program loading #2334: we should continue with this initiative
   b. Getting rid of -> (Allow working with all probe params (kfunc, uprobe) #2477)
3. Contribution bar (follow-up from the last meeting).

Feel free to suggest any more.

[ajor]

All times are good for me!

[fbs]

I cant do the wednesday

[danobi]

All three work for me

[viktormalik]

Great, so let's meet on Tuesday, April 4th, 4pm CEST (8am EDT, 3pm BST).

Link: https://meet.google.com/jsk-rrse-srn
Invitation: 23-04-04_bpftrace_office_hours.tar.gz

The meeting is open to anyone :-) (ping @xh4n3 as he joined the last time)

[fbs]

I'm afraid I have to cancel :(. Got a last minute family thing pop up. Don't have much to add, just happy that @ajor has time to do work.

[viktormalik]

I created a document for the office hours meeting minutes:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nt010RfL4s4gydhCPSJ-Z5mnFMFuD4NrcpVmUcyvu2E/edit?usp=sharing

I also opened #2550 which adds the link to the README.

I'd suggest keeping this discussion open to settle on meeting times if necessary.

[viktormalik]

The time for the next meeting is approaching, any updates in timezones?
@ajor, @fbs, @danobi.

[danobi]

Tues - Fri also works for me. Still MT

[fbs]

I can't do tmorrow (tue), but should be ok for the rest of the week :)

[viktormalik]

Ok, let's do Wednesday, May 3rd, 9am MT, 4pm BST, 5pm CEST. I'll put the information, including the meet link, to the document.

[viktormalik]

I added meeting minutes from yesterday to the doc.

One more organizational thing: @fbs and @ajor, if you have a Google account, could you send it to me? I'd add you to the document and the meeting so that you can edit and join them without my interception.

Thanks!

[ajor]

Could you add my work email please? It's my Git Hub username at meta.com

[viktormalik]

Hopefully this is the last thread in this discussion :-)

I checked possible regular times for bpftrace office hours and the one we selected is great as it covers pretty much every reasonable timezone. I'd still prefer to alter between two times to allow joining for people who have a regular conflict in one of the times and also to be more welcoming to people from the US west coast. We could either shift the other time by 2-3 hours forward or to select something completely different.

To make the selection simpler, I created a Doodle poll for the first week of August. Please do select all times that are suitable for you and I'm going to pick the two most voted and we'll switch between them periodically (every time the first week of the month).

https://doodle.com/meeting/participate/id/dwrEYxwb

[viktormalik]

August is approaching so I made a decision on the regular schedule. I also put it down to the document.

We will switch between two times:

• odd months: the first Tuesday, 5pm CET/CEST
• even months: the first Thursday, 3pm CET/CEST

This means that the next meeting will be on Thursday, August 3rd, 3pm CEST.

The meeting stays the same: https://meet.google.com/joo-jzcy-cqk.

I will also create recurring events in the calendar and invite all those that attended the last meeting.

@ajor, @danobi, @fbs, @brendangregg, @mmarchini, @alban, @xh4n3

[viktormalik]

This is a kind reminder that the next office hours meeting takes place today at 5pm CEST.

[fbs]

woop sorry, missed this in my calender, can't make it :(

[danobi]

Ah crap I gotta figure out how to stop forgetting

[viktormalik]

No worries, I updated the meeting minutes with today's meeting.

The next meeting will be on October 5, 3pm CEST. I'll send a reminder through this discussion the day before.

[brendangregg]

thanks, finally got it to show up on my calendar; I won't be able to make this one though.

[viktormalik]

This is a kind reminder that the next office hours meeting will happen this week on October 5, 3pm CEST.

Please fill items to the agenda.

[viktormalik]

Reminder: the office hours meeting is starting now

[viktormalik]

This is a kind reminder that the next office hours meeting will happen tomorrow on November 7, 5pm CET.

Please fill items to the agenda.

[viktormalik]

Reminder: the office hours meeting starts in 10 minutes.

[viktormalik]

This is a kind reminder that the next office hours meeting will happen tomorrow on December 7, 3pm CET (2pm UTC).

Please fill items to the agenda.

[viktormalik]

Reminder: the office hours meeting starts in 20 minutes.

[viktormalik]

Hi, the next office hours meeting is scheduled for Jan 2, which is the day after New Year's Eve. I personally planned to take some time off for that day, what about if we rescheduled this one to Jan 4 (Thursday same week), 5pm CET?

@ajor @danobi @fbs @jordalgo

[jordalgo]

Works for me.

[danobi]

Should be good for me as well

[ajor]

Thanks! I'm also having some time off then

[viktormalik]

Thanks! Rescheduled to Jan 4, 5pm CET.

[viktormalik]

Hi, the next office hours is scheduled for today, 5pm CET. We only have one item on the agenda so far, so please add more.

[viktormalik]

This is a kind reminder that the next office hours meeting will happen tomorrow, February 1, 3pm CET (2pm UTC).

Please fill items to the agenda.

[jordalgo]

Agenda doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nt010RfL4s4gydhCPSJ-Z5mnFMFuD4NrcpVmUcyvu2E/edit#heading=h.v1c6uuvyxuw6

[viktormalik]

Hi, the next office hours meeting will take place today, April 4, 3pm CEST (1pm UTC).

Please, fill items to the agenda:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nt010RfL4s4gydhCPSJ-Z5mnFMFuD4NrcpVmUcyvu2E/edit?usp=sharing

[viktormalik]

Hi, the next office hours meeting will take place tomorrow, May 7, 5pm CEST (3pm UTC).

Please, fill items to the agenda:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nt010RfL4s4gydhCPSJ-Z5mnFMFuD4NrcpVmUcyvu2E/edit?usp=sharing