[Buildroot] Virtual/online Buildroot Developers meeting ?

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@bootlin.com>]

On Mon, 13 Jul 2020 09:45:43 +0200
Arnout Vandecappelle <arnout@mind.be> wrote:

>  [Yes, I'm still alive :-) ]

Awesome, some of us were wondering ! :-)

> >>  - What format should it take ? One full day once in a while ? Just a
> >>    few hours here and there ? Multiple days in a row ?  
> > 
> > My preference would be to block two or more days in a row. Sun-Mon ro
> > Sun-Tue would be ideal for me, but I can adapt.  
> 
>  I also think it's easier to organise at least one and maybe several days in a
> row. For that, you clear your calendar, while if it's just for a couple of hours
> you tend not to do the effort.

On my side, I agree that doing full days is going to be easier than
just a few hours here and there. It also allows to focus on something a
bit more complex than what can be done in just 2-3 hours.

However, the question is whether we want a few full days spread over
time, or grouped together. Or perhaps just have 2 meetings of 2 days
each, a few weeks apart ?

> > This is indeed very tricky. We will probably have to adapt depending on
> > how many of us are attending.  
> 
>  Not so tricky at all. Zoom has breakout rooms, and in the other technologies
> you can easily create a new room and switch to it. I have even done two meetings
> in parallel once, but that eats away CPU like there's no tomorrow.

Indeed, you can always switch to a different meeting room, but it's
then really separate. Unlike in a real room where it's possible to have
side discussions while still having everyone "hear" those discussions,
with the ability to jump in.

But anyway, there's no way we will be able to fully emulate a physical
meeting.

Maybe one thing we should do is prepare the meeting a bit better,
especially with a list of topics / patch series to discuss. We then
spent some time discussing each topic to take a bunch of decisions,
assign each topic to someone, go back to our keyboards and get the work
done ?

>  Shared desktop is absolutely required. But all meeting software supports that.
> 
>  Here are the candidates that I've used and think are suitable (in no particular
> order):
> 
> - jitsi
> - zoom
> - Google meet
> - discord
> - whereby

If that's needed, Bootlin has its own Jitsi installation, which we can
use. We've used it successfully to deliver 4 hours training courses,
over several days, and it works fine.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com