NetBox Maintainers Meeting Minutes, 15 Feb 2024

[jeffgdotorg]

NetBox maintainers meeting minutes, 15 Feb 2024

[Jeremy] There are currently 40 unassigned bug reports

• We need to get that number down
• Direct ask: Each maintainer please select 3 open, unassigned bugs and deliver PRs for 2 of them by end of next week. At minimum please identify next steps or blocking items. We'll follow up in next week's call.

[Jeff] Plugin certification update

• I've been in conversations with plugin maintainers including Peter, Nikolay, Ryan, and Mattijs about establishing co-maintainer relationships so that NetBox Labs can make emergency releases if a maintainer is e.g. on holiday, and can assure continuity in case a maintainer needs to step away longer-term.
• The first step in this process involves the plugins' GitHub repos.
• ↳ Ryan and I have been working on moving the ACLs plugin to the netbox-community org, and as expected we're hitting bumps, but we'll get through it and find a viable way forward for plugins whose maintainers are happy with transferring as the way to tick this box.
• ↳ Some maintainers will not want to transfer their repos, and we'll offer a backup process for those cases that preserves the benefits of the co-maintainer relationship.
• Dan: Good idea to make sure that plugin maintainers have a CI pipeline set up to publish new releases to PyPI automatically
• ↳ Jeff: Thanks, good catch, I'll add that to the qualifications.

[Jeff] maintainer program non-update

• Just a bump; I haven't forgotten about this, but have had little time to dedicate to it.
• Still planning to introduce fixed-length terms for maintainer service as a burnout mitigation measure.

[Jeremy] v4.0 milestone updates

• Today is the midway point for the 4.0 release cycle; we have from 01 Jan to 31 Mar to build the thing, with first beta on 01 Apr and final release on 30 Apr.
• We've completed a ton of work. Specifically, 23 issues are completed out of a total 39 created to date. 8 more accepted ideas are bookmarked for issue creation.
• Themes for completed work include:
• ↳ Dynamic serializer fields, many other API improvements
• ↳ Arthur has been hard at work merging the functionality of reports into scripts and creating a DB representation of scripts, so that they're first-class objects addressable via the API
• Initiatives currently under work include:
• ↳ DB representation of scripts #14438: in cleanup and validation phase; work is mostly done
• ↳ Enable HTMX for all views #14736 : Draft PR with ongoing refinements as we identify corner cases that need fixing.
• Bumping to next week:
• ↳ Dynamic queryset annotations for REST API endpoints #15131
• ↳ Pagination and filtering of script results #10587
• Others:
• ↳ Rearchitect the logic for registering models #15042
• ↳ Improve form rendering using fieldsets #14739
• ↳ Replace graphene-django with Strawberry (the elephant in the room) #9856
• ↳ ↳ Arthur: Next week we should have a strong idea of which cleanup items remain
• ↳ ↳ We're inadvertently hedging a little bit by simultaneously committing to the Strawberry change and improving the REST API in ways that might fairly be described as "GraphQL lite", i.e. enabling caller optimization of result fields
• ↳ ↳ In the next week or two we will recalibrate the priorities of the remaining open issues
• Dan: We should work to update the official installation docs to cover current releases of e.g. RHEL and derivatives (Dan will add to the list)
• Plenty of other cleanup items will continue to filter into the v4.0 milestone, with a bias toward infrastructure work and core improvements over major new features