Meeting run by shepmaster. Minutes written by pietroalbini.
Attending: aidanhs, alexcrichton, kennytm, Mark-Simulacrum, pietroalbini, shepmaster
Start of the conversation

Removing MSYS2 ca-certificates workaround (P-high issue)

A few weeks ago our CI broke due to a broken ca-certificates MSYS2 package, which caused all Windows builders to fail. The temporary patch was to install a vendored copy of that package, and since it’s not needed anymore pietroalbini landed a PR this week removing the hack from our CI configuration.

The other part of the issue is figuring out whether to vendor MSYS2 and MinGW as a whole, but there is the issue of keeping the mirrors sort of up to date, and we don’t have a clear idea on how to fix that at the moment. We decided to downgrade the issue to P-medium and to talk about mirroring and vendoring at the All Hands 2020. In preparation of that meeting it will be useful to audit what we mirror at the moment and how old that is, but it’s not urgent and nobody has the time to work on it right now.

Figuring out data retention on Azure Pipelines (P-medium issue)

This is not yet an issue, as the current retention is configured to 2 years. We’re waiting on some talks with Microsoft to settle before starting to poke people about this again.

Re-enable LLVM/debug assertions on slow builders (P-medium issue)

We still don’t have the time budget to enable them back, but increasing the core count should allow us to do that.

New server for perf

alexcrichton ordered an AX41-NVMe bare metal server from Hetzner as a replacement benchmarking machine for perf, paid by Mozilla. We’re waiting on Hetzner to give us access to it before simulacrum can try it out and configure it. If we don’t get access in a few days alexcrichton is going to ping them.

Lifecycle policy for static.rust-lang.org

static.rust-lang.org is backed by a S3 bucket, and since 2016 versioning is enabled on the bucket to prevent issues with accidental file deletions. Some of the files in that bucket are overridden each day though (for example nightly compilers), keeping a bunch of past versions stored. Those past versions are useless as there isn’t an easy way to get them from the CDN, and the files are also stored separately in other places on that bucket. Everyone agreed we should enable lifecycle policy to delete those useless files, and we reached a consensus on deleting them after three months. This won’t be noticeable by end users, installing old nightlies by date will still work.

What to do with the rust-lang-ci S3 bucket

rust-lang-ci is a really old and currently unused S3 bucket which was used to store CI artifacts before we migrated them to rust-lang-ci2. There are still some files in there, so we enabled bucket logging for a month to see how frequent files there were accessed.

Turns out, we had a total of 86 successful requests in a month, split between:

• 69 requests were accessing cargo builds of 1.14.0
• 17 requests were accessing old CI mirrors

Due to the low traffic we decided to remove those old CI mirrors, but for the cargo builds the question is more complicated. Due to a bug in the manifest generation back then, installing Rust 1.14.0 from rustup actually downloads Cargo from the bucket instead of the CDN, and removing those files would permanently break installing Rust 1.14.0. There was disagreement on whether to do that inside the team, and we reached the decision to wait until pietroalbini investigates whether redirects are feasible to configure in S3.

Early feedback on pietroalbini’s WIP ci-generate branch

pietroalbini is working on a branch that implements a generator for our CI configuration, from a simplified custom DSL (branch - documentation). While the generator has a number of small benefits for us, the main driver between the creation of the branch is to work around some limitations in GitHub Actions’s configuration syntax, namely the lack of importable templates. There wasn’t time to properly discuss this so we deferred to next week.

Revisiting meeting run rotation

A month ago we started rotating who runs the meetings, intending to revisit the decision today. The team felt either neutral or positive about the idea, so we’ll keep doing that for a while. aidanhs is going to run the next meeting.