 Well, welcome everyone it's the 28th of April 2023 this is Asia documentation office hours thanks for being here topics on my list Google summer of code, a proposal to change the rating system. Upcoming LTS documentation transition from Java 11 to Java 17 and end of life notifications and early end of life percent of seven, we may not get to those last two and I'm not sure it's crucial that we do any other topics you want to put on the list. No, no good for me. Okay, so Chris. We have have we officially submitted or it's is that coming still. It's submitted I think the application has been closed so like we have submitted rankings. Okay, Google for Googleism of code and that should be double checked everything to be all right, including the mentors list for every select project, so it should be okay. Excellent Thank you Chris thanks very much congratulations to you and the other organization admin so next next milestone is May the fourth when Google announces the projects right yep. Excellent congratulations thanks very much any any questions make from you or Chris any other comments on Google summer of code. I take it we had very good projects this year, we did we had we had many, many submissions we had lots of involvement from people and the data the data looks very good excellent good to hear. All right, so the next topic then is a proposal from Alex brand us what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you the how it looks today. And then we can talk about why the way it looks today is imperfect and flawed. So what you see here is the Jenkins changelog and there are three icons across the top of each changelog entry. A thunder cloud that has hover text I had to roll back a cloud I experienced notable issues and the sunshine it says no major issues with this release. And what the problem we get is we get silly things like this, where someone pressed the rollback or the notable issues, and then when the dialogue appeared that says please provide the issue number, they put in the number one. Now one is not a helpful thing because this issue is actually not relevant to that release. And we know it's not right because that issue was resolved in 2007. So, and when people put other issue numbers thinking they're being charming or cute or whatever it reduces the value of the thing. However, all of our discussions on what can we do to improve the quality of the data that people submit there have ended in a, in a G there's not much we can do because anything we do will tend to reject the wrong things, all sorts of challenges so this is what we have today. What Alex is proposing is we he says hey look, this is a problem because there's really no classification of the numbers that they put in. There's no way we can connect with them when they enter something it's completely anonymous. So his recommendation let's take out the neutral my negative votes. So the cloud and the thunder cloud, and just put up a banner at the top so let's look at what he's proposing. So this is his suggestion, it would look like this. So just with the the sunshine so I'm going to click an older one to show what happens. So it says thanks. And now there should be a 14 there it is so it incremented by one. Okay. So, so and this is the banner that he's added saying hey if you need to encounter an issue, or if you encounter an issue, please use the community forums to report that issue. Report the bugs on JIRA following these issue reporting guidelines, and the issue reporting guidelines. Alex and I are two relatively active people on JIRA. And it is the most common thing that happens is we have to tell people, you have not given us enough information to duplicate your bug. Please follow the instructions. And the most common response is completely being ignored. So, I think, well, so first before we look at what Tim Jacob's comments were in my comments, anything from either of you from Meg from you or from Chris in terms of what you think about the considering going from the old way with oops with. We leave out three fields to the new way with only one. Just devil's advocate. What does it buy us to get the sunshine wins and is that just a count of how many people said that was happy or it is it's a psychological thing for them to say yes I like that. No no it's it's not so much psychological for them, although we're happy if it helps them that way. It's that we use it in deciding which, which Jenkins version should be chosen as the next LTS baseline. Okay, so when when I went when I sent email about three or four days ago, saying I recommend 2.401 be selected as the LTS base as the next LTS baseline. It was because among other things I had looked at this at this data and said, ah, that looks like that's okay. I specifically looked at this data, and was very concerned because of that number and this bug report. And correctly so that bug report is an unhealthy bug. So, so you would not with the new system you wouldn't see that number. Right, with the new system, this would be gone. And now I, I had to go. I had to watch the bug tracker anyway so the rating system is certainly not enough to choose an LTS baseline. Right, I looked in JIRA, I, I considered the changes that have been made in various versions. So there's there's much more to choosing an LTS baseline than just reading the rating system. Yeah, okay. That sounds reasonable. So is Chris anything else that you wanted to observe there. Yeah, the new system is more simple and a lot more cleaner. I think it certainly is simpler and cleaner you're right. Yeah. And if you're the information you're losing isn't something you really use much than why not. Well, okay, good point. Any other comments there. Okay, so my, my concern was that, that I'm, I'm one who uses the rating system. And so I absolutely did not want to lose it. Tim Jacome, our release officer said, Hey, I'm confused. He's conflicted with it. He sees them as helpful to get a pulse of the community, but it is spammy, right. It tends to be low value content at certain times. And you can see it if you look at, if you look through the history you'll see, let's see some for instance, here's one with two rollbacks and not none of them entered a bug report. 10 and we got one bug number. 24. And only two bug numbers are distinct and three total. So, so most people when they click the, they had to roll back. Do not. They will click this and they'll do okay. And it says, are you sure. And if you mean it will click okay to skip. And so now that number will go up to 11. We now have one more, one more entry there or they entered a two or a 33 it said or 8908. Now that one has nothing to do with with anything in that release. So same thing is questionable number. And they aren't doing something like filing a GitHub bug and giving a GitHub bug number issue number. Not as far as I know because at least Jenkins core doesn't doesn't have GitHub issues enabled. So if they were filing it would be someplace that I don't know where it is. Okay. So, so just again I'm. So, I mean how much of it. Another alternative is that they get in there and they say, you know, I rolled it back and I'm not doing a lot more. I mean, I, you know, I'm getting so sick of everything I buy everybody wants to know what I thought of it. And I'm like, you know, right, we're at one time it was kind of fun. They want to know and now it's getting into overload. But whether there was something like I don't want to bother with filing a bug. It's a bug. It's not that big a deal to me or whatever. They don't have many options for what they if they don't want to. I mean it also strikes me that if you have no details knowing that if you look on here and you see there's a release where you've had, you know, like 70 people had to roll back. I mean, I, because I know that too I get into it's like I'm willing to tell you that didn't work. And then you start wanting my social security number and my mother name and my favorite elementary school, you know, and it's and I just say no I don't have time for you. You know, rather than saying I had to roll it back and I'm not invested enough for you, but I think you make a very good point that the single click that's involved here and possibly one other field to enter, maybe the threshold that people will stay long enough to enter it. Whereas if we try to put them into Jira. And that is if we put them into Jira, they have to have an account on accounts that Jenkins IO, and we expect them to do a good bug report. And that's a lot more effort than they may be willing to spend whereas. Okay, this one, this one is actually a good example of, Hey, there was a significant issue and roughly half of those who click the ID had to roll back chose the same issue report. Okay. So that one, this one is really an example of, Hey, this was quite positive, quite, quite useful and high information content. How would they get to they have to go into Jira and look and say, Oh yeah, that's my air. That's another effort is to if you when you had that one of your options could be are one of these the issue you had. So that I could simply get to it. The other thing that I see that's potentially useful is if I'm sitting here thinking about installing it. And there's two types of either is one who's, Oh, this thing buggy I want to go in and play with it and see if I can figure it out because I'm that kind of a geek. The other is, she an awful large percentage of people who tried to do this have had problems. Maybe I'll wait a few days and see what happens. And we do lose, we do lose that and you know, again, it's not 100% reliable right. We could have only one person who had to roll it back and they did a whole big thing and it's a huge problem and nobody in their right mind should ever try to install them. Correct, you're, you're certainly right. But it I'm thinking if I see something that 50 some people have had to roll back. Because we wouldn't actually fix that one release right if no we will deliver a new release right if it's yeah if something is so catastrophically broken, or has a disastrous security problem introduced we will roll a new release. Right. So, so there is that piece of information. Good. And there's also something psychologically. We want to know what you think. Are you happy. Right. It's like, well, no, I'm not happy. Do you want to hear it, you know, and I at that point I've got nothing else. There's no place to say anything. Yeah. I mean, another thing what you could simplify is, I'm happy. I'm not happy. And we're not happy. It could, you could say, you could give them a list of issues, not one of these are issues that you want to just tell us what happened. You know, which might not be your full bug report, but it might be a hint. Yeah, sure. You know, I mean, it may be I had to roll it back because halfway through there was a power outage, and everything was blown up in these and I didn't have more time and the easiest thing was to roll back. Okay. Okay. And on top of that, I just want to add, like, um, well, unless we have a feature that would give us a drop down list of all the issues passed per like, per release. Otherwise, it's the future would not be as helpful. So we maybe we could, like, request a feature for that. Okay. Yeah, the challenge I agree that if the if a list of issues were presented, it would, in addition to the empty field, empty field, prompting for a bug number. It might have might significantly increased the, the risk, the value of the responses right so if we did the last five bug reports or something like that. Last five last seven bug reports, or the last the titles of the last seven of the most recent seven bug reports something like that. As just a wild guess. And titles of any bug. Well, no, that was probably begging well and titles of bug reports already mentioned. So that they would see, oh, hey, 70131 is has the text that tells me something that sounds like what I was seeing as well click it. Right. Okay, good. Good. Good insight. And then another if you know, I don't know that I'm voting on it. I'm trying to take the opposite side, because it doesn't clean along with that could be underneath that could be a link if you'd like to file a bug. Go here your link to Jira and follow these guidelines that thing that you had but put it right here so they don't have to go looking for it. Because you know again when I don't know where to go how much am I going to go snooping around to try to find stuff. And then after that just leave a blank play and make it, you know, give them 140 characters something you know, or would you like to tell us what your problem was briefly here. When my assumption would be in a large number of cases you would just ignore that but they would feel like they've been able to say something. Okay, so yeah so the ratings database, I think, doesn't have so suggested. If we could extend the ratings database to accept general text. We could let them express their opinion. Right. The problem then is then we've got to read that. We need to read that with the usual indelicate. Like appropriate content that arrives. Right. Just, just being a real pain in the took us. What if you didn't read it. Well then it would then it would be no worse than the fact that today we have relatively few people who read. I'm going to paste a link into this one with. This is something that relatively few of us read. I'll open it here you have to both promise that you won't be offended if there are words in it that really shouldn't be shown. You know my vocabulary versus yours. I've done this road before. Good, very good. Well, so here's this sheet, this Google sheet is the content of feedback given by readers who are reading pages on www.Jenkins.io when when they click, when they click, did this page help you or some such thing. If you find a page and I'll show you what it's like was this page helpful when they click this. Then please submit your feedback through this quick form. So here's the feedback form, it was neutral demonstration during Docs office hours and answer to one plus three is for submit. So in order to give foul language to us first they have to have answered a trivial question. Yeah, and there is the text that was just added. Right. I mean it could be worded, you know, say, you know, to be most useful. We need to know you know we need an issue just just this you sound like your stuff or, or go here and file one, and say you can also just leave a, you know a brief report. I guarantee we'd look at it. But the one thing might be, if you had one that had, you know, 50 thunderclouds filed, nobody had filed a bug report, a jerry ticket. And you're just curious what's going on it might be worth going and seeing if there were any hints in there. It may have been some community college took an introductory class and said let's download Jenkins. Right. Or decided that as their bug submission exercise they were going to test stress test the Jenkins ratings database. Right. For anything else but you know you might just find some you know you might find that 50 people just didn't feel like missing. There wasn't a ticket they could just click on they didn't feel like filing ones. But they all said, when this was half installed, my machine room caught in fire. You know, and you're like, gee, flammable pipeline so I don't know. And that you know there's a question of how much. Like, I think this thing that suggests it would be kind of cool, but is it useful enough to be worth the effort. And whether useful or not, right now the the most common thing is all the ideas in the world need to be supported by someone actually doing the implementation we don't have anyone who's interested in doing that implementation. Right. So if someone decides they'd like to do the implementation that's a different thing then it's okay how would we do it and here's the benefit. It would actually be would that be a good issue for some student floating around you wants to is this a good first issue. Or is this this is probably not well suited to a good first issue because it requires access to the ratings database which is a privileged operation. And they could do it maybe with a prototype copy of the database but ultimately it's their privileged operations involved and it's not really well well equipped for development experience. Yeah. Okay. So. So are the two of you okay if I submit this as our comment for right now. I was going to make that we're this is not a vote. No, no, this, we're not this is not voting. This is just making comments. Just a thought. Exactly. All right, thanks. Anything else on the community feedback site suggestion before we go on. I'm good. Okay, next topic then we've got the 2.387.3. Change log and upgrade the release is next week. Thanks Chris very very much. Okay, you're welcome. And here is the change log. Let's see I was hoping he had a screenshot. Nope, so we'll have to, we'll have to we would have to look at it separately I have the action I review this. Whoops, it's been closed. Oh, he reopened another one I assume right Chris. Yeah, yeah. Okay, here it is good. All right so this one. And I was hoping he gave it here it is so here's the screenshot. Cool. So emojis and job DSL hide the checkbox fix overflow text and restore new note Oh and then the crucial thing actually is hiding in the chain in the upgrade guide not the change log. Where what the upgrade guide says is a dear okay obviously I need to do some edits here. Extreme and asking all handling has changed. And with this change. They need to be sure they upgrade their the J unit plug into the latest version. So the problem is the old version of the plug in was writing an ASCII zero asking no, and that's that that's per the XML one dot one specification that's illegal it's not allowed. So this is now better compliant with the specification, but the problem is we have data we may have data on customer on systems that can't be read if you don't have the new version of the of the, the giant J unit plugin. Yeah, so and, and certainly there's a there's a larger fix proposed or a larger change proposed for inclusion in Jenkins weekly, but it's not necessary to put it into the LTS so we're just going to go ahead with tell people to upgrade their J unit plugin. Okay. Sounds good. All right. Anything else on the LTS. Nope. Okay, next one that plan to transition the documentation from Java 11 to Java 17 in past sessions. We've discussed that Java 17 is now fully supported. And Java, Java 11 will no longer will not be included in the upcoming release of Debian. It won't won't be available. So we felt like rather than spending energy to describe Oh for Debbie and 12 you have to use Java 17. Let's use this as our excuse to document describe everything with Java 17 and let people use Java 11 if they wish but Java 17 will be the thing we're describing. Okay, and so Kevin has started the work on this we identified several pages that need to be changed. And, and we're going to go forward we're now late April, and the goal was to complete this in April or May. Okay. So we're on our way. We are yep. Any questions on that one. Nope. Okay, then next piece was the concept of end of life notifications in Jenkins core. I believe Chris you and I discussed this last time and I'm not sure there's a significant change that needs to be needs to be described further. I actually about 15 minutes ago started the implementation. So, I've discussed it with different levels of people Meg for your info the idea is that Ubuntu 18 will be end of life May 31 2023. Only supports operating systems that are supported by the upstream vendor. We went to 18 will be unsupported June 1. But we don't have a way inside the Jenkins UI to tell the user, hey, you're running on an operating system we don't support. And so the idea here was, let's find a way to tell that user, you're running on an operating system we don't support. And with the, the thought that we may be able to use this same technique to tell people, you're running a Docker container that we no longer maintain. Oh yeah, or you're running a something else that is no longer receiving updates. And, and so that they know, oh, I need to make a change based on this alert that tells me something. Right. Before I don't feel like making a change I'll take my chances but sure and then at least they've been warned, they have to take their chances. And the concept is that there are there are some things that are a little different about this in that there is a, when should we start showing them the warning what date should we start showing them the warning. And during the warning period, what what during the pre pre period, we give one message then the, the final date happens the thing is now end of life. We give them a different message and bring the admin monitor up again to say, Oh, hey, you are. You are not. You are not supported any longer. So does it. The idea has has resonated with, well, when I reviewed it with Chris last week and with Alex Brand as it was it seemed to be positively really received that hey that that would be a helpful thing. So, so there, let's, let's take it that way. And I'll, I'll certainly share as I learn more. I'm not a great implementer of Jenkins core features but I'm happy to experiment and try and rely on people to tell me no you could do it better if you did this or better if you did that. And looking at the next bullet list, would you, if you get this implemented, were you able to use that for CentOS. Yes, and that this is what started the whole idea, right because the fact that I dislike CentOS so strongly. It motivated me to say how do we get a message to users that tells them we're ending support for CentOS seven. And a piece of this is my, my dream is that we'll declare end of life for CentOS seven. Well before the official end of life, June 30 of 2024 so I would really love to have CentOS seven no longer supported be by the end of this calendar year, because it's it's already. There's plenty of plenty of parts of it are already unsupportable. Okay. Great. Any, any other topics for today's session. I'm good. I'm good to. All right, thanks to both of you. Recording will be available whenever I get around to posting the recording. Perfect. Thanks so much.