Virtual XFS Developer Meetings

["Darrick J. Wong" <darrick.wong@oracle.com>]

Hi everyone,

I propose that we hold our own virtual XFS developer summit.  Physical
proximity is way too risky for the forseeable future, so let's make do
with online discussions and conferencing.  LSFMM 2020 was officially
cancelled a short time ago.

Unlike in-person events, we cannot pin everyone into a single time zone
for an extended meeting, and we can't have a hallway BOF.  On the plus
side, we can finally invite /everyone/ to the table!  Let's use this
email thread to make a list of topics for future discussions.  I can
think of a few topic categories to start:

 1. Development process problems that people would like to address.
 2. Matching patch authors with patch reviewers.
 3. Old features that we ought to retire.
 4. New feature development roadmap.
 5. Anything else that people think is important.

Once we have a list of specific topics matched with people who are
interested in that topic, I think it best to start each of those
conversations in separate threads on linux-xfs where everyone can see
them.  If the participants feel that they'd get more out of an
interactive session, we have plenty of options for doing that:

The first option of course is the IRC channel (#xfs on freenode) from
which it is easy to paste the irc logs into linux-xfs for archiving and
further public comment.

For actual video conferencing, we also have tools such as Jitsi,
BigBlueButton, BlueJeans, and Zoom.  I'm willing to sit in on video
meetings to take notes for linux-xfs and/or post the recordings online.
As a side note for anyone wanting to take advantage of videochats --
I'd prefer to keep this to one hourlong meeting per day.

Please remember this is not an edict passed on from high to shake up
everything; it is merely this maintainer suggesting that we explore
other tactics for building things together.  In the end, everything that
goes into making decisions still must be communicated via linux-xfs, and
patches still have to earn Reviewed-by tags.  We do, however, have
flexibility in how we get there.

Here are some topics that have been mentioned to me at least in passing
over the last few months.  I'll start the first five topics since
they're the ones I was going to put on the agenda for an XFS meeting at
LSFMM until that all blew away.

 - Refactoring the Review Process (me, Eric, Dave)

 - Deferred inode inactivation and nonblocking inode reclaim (me, Amir)

 - 64bit timestamps (me, Amir)

 - Atomic extent swaps (me)

 - Online fsck (me)

 - Deprecating the v4 format (Dave)

 - Parent Pointers (Amir)

 - Range Locks (Amir)

 - DAX bashing session (Dan)

 - Widening the inode fork extent counters (Chandan)

 - Dirty buffer region bitmap tracking (Chandan)

 - Add your pet item here! :)

Thoughts, suggestions, and flames appreciated!

--D