Dev Chat Summary: February 7th (4.9.5 week 1)

This post summarizes the dev chat meeting from February 7th (agenda, Slack archive).

4.9.3 + 4.9.4 update

• 4.9.3 went out on Monday, 4.9.4 went out on Tuesday; note technical details behind 4.9.4
• Note final paragraph from the 4.9.4 technical details post:
  • What we’re doing to prevent this happening again We’ll be making a follow up post after we’ve been able to determine how to ensure that this never happens again. We don’t like bugs in WordPress any more than you do, and we’ll be taking steps to both increase automated coverage of our updates and improve tools to aid in the detection of similar bugs before they become an issue in the future.
• If you have ideas, solutions, or are able to support increasing “automated coverage of our updates” and improving “tools to aid in the detection of similar bugs” then please gather those and add them to the pending post on this topic.
• @jbpaul17 to see if any process-related changes might help
• @sergey also asked for ideas on how we can improve the quality and consistency of our code reviews
• @helen spoke with @dd32 and will look into a way to test auto-updates
• @desrosj noted that automating some parts of the release process might help

Updates from focus leads and component maintainers

• The Editor / GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ team has begun discussion on the scope and features for Gutenberg’s MVP. They also have their weekly bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. scrub tomorrow (Thursday, February 8th) at 17:00 UTC.
• The Media team posted a recap from their previous meeting for review.

General announcements

• Comment thread from today’s agenda post on topic of security not able to be addressed as no one from the Security team was present, but @aaroncampbell provided a response ahead of time:
  
  • Okay, so this is the DoS issue with load-scripts.php and load-styles.php: Basically, the best mitigation for this is at the networknetwork (versus site, blog) level. Hosts and WAFs can rate limit this in a way that makes a lot more sense than anything WordPress can do. Caching would also be extremely useful in this case. Something that we _could_ do is limit the number of scripts that could be loaded at once with those, but the problem with that is all it does is reduce the load by some relatively marginal amount.
• @leemon asks for review on #43226; @drewapicture to take a look
• @binarymoon asks for review on #38545; looking for someone to give feedback and get to an agreement so this ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. can move forward
• @joyously asked whether New Contributor meeting was still occurring; @desrosj to speak with other facilitators and get the meetings re-started
• @williampatton shared insights into his experience being a deputy release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release. on 4.9.3; encourages others to contribute as leads, noting coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. commit access is not required, recommends pairing with experienced lead; highlighted permissions issues that should be resolved; thankful for support from others during the release process; will help elaborate on minor release handbook page
• @chanthaboune highlighted the need to “lessen that cognitive load for new/learning release leads”, need to call out contingencies and what’s time-specific; in general how can we make the contribution process easier

Next meeting

The next meeting will take place on February 14, 2018 at 21:00 UTC / February 14, 2018 at 21:00 UTC in the #core SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel. Please feel free to drop in with any updates or questions. If you have items to discuss but cannot make the meeting, please leave a comment on this post so that we can take them into account.

#4-9-5, #core, #dev-chat, #summary