Update from the team

It has been a while since we provided an update to the Gluster community. Across the world various nations, states and localities have put together sets of guidelines around shelter-in-place and quarantine. We request our community members to stay safe, to care for their loved ones, to continue to be outstanding citizens and take time out from projects if necessary and required. These are challenging times – unforeseen circumstances and we can be there for each other so as to strengthen our bonds of community.

There have been quite a few things happening in the project. If that caught you by surprise then here’s a quick list of some of the important things

• A switchover from using the bugzilla instance provided by Red Hat to a GitHub based flow (Ref #824)
• The Gerrit based development workflow is in process of  switching over to GitHub
• Review of the repositories on GitHub and archiving a considerable number of them as they had been stale
• Project releases
  • 5.x (5.13 is the last release of the series)
  • 6.x
  • 7.x
  • Release 8.0 is announced and branching is done from master branch.
• Number of commits in the last 60 days
  • 269
• Notable works/work-in-progress
  • Mohit’s create performance patch 
  • Barak’s work in DHT
  • Xavi’s work on memory corruption and Crash reduction
  • Community effort to revisit failing tests
  • Error Codes to make debug happy

There are quite a few items on our list of things to complete. We have to work through the initial hiccups around the switch from Gerrit to GitHub. There is a need to focus on the quality of the release and ensure that we ship stable builds – with new members stepping up to complete release management, there have been areas which we have not been able to stick to our usual polish. These are part of our day to day operations.

We also need to focus our attention on continuing to address the needs expressed by our users and community. That includes making the best possible file-based distributed storage. I do not see a reason to split our focus and energies on trying to deliver containerized Gluster. Already there are other upstream communities who have declared definitive intent to deliver that experience. We should step back from that and use the space to focus on something we are absolutely passionate about – making releases which our users can put large enterprise workloads on, improving the quality of user experience, working on our interactions with the community members over email, Slack and GItHub issues.

Over the past 12 months or so we stepped away from working on gd2 – the next design of glusterd is not going to be necessary if we choose to step away from building for containers. With some of the key contributors moving away from the project it is difficult to continue to invest in that and keep the lights on towards delivering something that is worthwhile for our users. We will be archiving the GD2 project with a note that this is not going to be seeing the light of the day. 

Our focus would also allow us to hold conversations with downstream consumers of our project. While we certainly would not want to make changes that impact the software supply chain, there are changes which need to be made – and those will have a cascading effect on downstream consumers. It also stands to reason that we decide as a group on the number of target environments for which to build and how we can get more expertise. For quite some time we had Kaleb to shepherd the builds. With Kaleb’s energies now focused on his other projects, we will not be able to have a drop-in replacement for those hard earned skills – we need to decide and see how we can continue to serve our community without overstretching the individuals. With the changes in how CentOS releases will come about we will need to think about whether our presence in the CentOS Storage-SIG is giving us the benefits we had originally planned for.

Our project sponsor Red Hat enables a set of engineers to work on the infrastructure of Gluster project. The switchover to GitHub has been primarily led by Deepshikha and Michael Scherer. We believe that this transition allows us to reach out to more developers and contributors who are interested in focusing on the needs of our community and engaging in the project.  We continue to focus on doing what is best for our community and users and doing right by them.

Once again wishing you all better health, and stay safe!