Collectd contributors meetup in Brussels

Last week, on January 31 and Feb 01, we had a contributors meetup of collectd in Brussels, just before FOSDEM. Thanks to our generous sponsors Camptocamp, Intel, and Red Hat, we were able to meet and to talk about various topics. In total, there were 15 persons attending, and if I'm not mistaken, all of them were sent by their employers, which underlines the interest here again.

• There was a request or suggestion, to have a monthly video call or a chat irc meeting to talk about progress, or to address issues raised over reviews. That could be a joint call monthly with the OPNFV Barometer community. More info and also minutes are available.

• We also talked about the concept of code-ownership, and decided to give it a try.

• Although the wiki registration is disabled, we would continue with using the current mediawiki for now. Octo pointed out, that spammers were causing real issues and work. If there is a request for getting a wiki account, please get in touch with one of the maintainers.

• In the session we had about testing and reviving CI tests, we briefly discussed both functional and also integration tests. Especially the latter will require some investigation. Marc already started to set-up and fix the CI for collectd on github.

• In the release process session, we went through the current release process and talked about possible automations, or how to make it a less time consuming process. Especially writing release notes or the changelog took time in the past. At the end, we decided to target three releases per year, as already happened in the past. That would be mid of March, mid of August and mid of December, with code-freeze/feature freeze at the beginning of the aforementioned months.

  Contributors of new features should also write a changelog item. This will become enforced by a bot, which octo added and enabled during the event.

• There was also a brief discussion over the lack of code reviews or a try to understand, why (new) contributors are not doing reviews. The general suggestion was to do them anyways, since it helps the project. If reviews are hard, then the involved code should get rewritten, since it wasn't clearly understandable.

• For a upcoming future major release, there was the expressed interest in having labels for metrics. There is a design document open up for discussion, and we also briefly talked about a migration plan. At the end, a collectd 5 client should still be able to cooperate with the new version, e.g via the network plugin.

• A often mentioned feature request is also the (un)loading of plugins and with that tightly connected the ability of re-configuring plugins at runtime and ideally having a API. This will take some further investigation.