Replicant Project Online Meetings¶

• Table of contents
• Replicant Project Online Meetings
  • Very first meeting.
    • Date, time, location and protocols
    • Meeting schedule
    • Meeting summary
      • People's presentation:
      • Status of the work done before the meeting:
      • Steering committee, Replicant community manager / manager
      • When to setup the next meeting.
      • Non-scheduled topics / questions:
  • 2nd meeting
    • Date, time, location and protocols
    • Meeting schedule

Very first meeting.¶

Date, time, location and protocols¶

18 June 2024 at 19:00 CEST
Mumble on the mumble.replicant.us self hosted Mumble server.

Public announcement: https://blog.replicant.us/2024/06/first-online-replicant-meeting/

Meeting schedule¶

1. Presentation of attendees (very short).
2. Summary of the current work:
   1. WordPress conversion to a static website (GNUtoo);
   2. other tiny infrastructure work (GNUtoo);
   3. building 100% free Android SDKs (wizzard);
   4. status of PinePhone work (NLnet funded) (GNUtoo, dllud).
3. Status of the Steering Committee and adding dllud to Steering Committee.
4. Call for the (Community) Manager.
5. How/when to setup the next meeting.
6. Other discussions.

Meeting summary¶

Attendees: dllud, GNUtoo, jack_kekzoz, Johannes__dolphinana, Putti, tct, thatch, wizzard
Duration: 1h30m
All scheduled topics were addressed.

People's presentation:¶

First the people presented themselves. Both GNUtoo and wizzard also started presenting what they worked on in more details:

• dllud: <TODO: please dllud fill in your presentation if you remember it>.
• GNUtoo was recently involved in sysadmin work and on the conversion of the blog from Wordpress to a static website (with haunt). He also applied for funding for working on the PinePhone but got sidetracked with another somewhat related project (GNU Boot) because he initially planned to use Libreboot to produce the bootloader for the PinePhone.
• jack_kekzoz helps answering questions on IRC. jack_kekzoz is also a postmarketOS contributors for devices with an Exynos system on a chip. jack_kekzoz also has a Galaxy Note II LTE (TTN71005?).
• wizzard is involved in automatizing builds of a free Android SDK.

• Johannes__dolphinana wants to contribute to Replicant.
• As we understood, thatch is interested in community networks and devices that can work with them and wants to learn how to contribute to Replicant on work that goes in this direction.
• 'tct' couldn't talk due to microphones issues but 'tct' is most likely Tiberiu from Technoetical.

Status of the work done before the meeting:¶

• For the conversion of the blog to a static website, GNUtoo explained his work:
  • why we needed a static blog: we cannot easily collaborate to write a blog post in WordPress: we need to share the article by mail, discuss parts of it, include improvements, in a way that is transparent, and git + mail works best for that
  • why haunt was chosen for that: haunt is very flexible and he is also migrating the GNU Boot website to haunt, so that shares the burden of learning between both projects.
  • The current status:
    • We still need to be able to have comments through the Replicant mailing list
    • We also need to not break URLs
    • As-is the blog is deployed on https://blog.test.replicant.us and the tools provided with its source code enable to import back the articles to WordPress so right now even if the work is not finished, we can still save a lot of time by collaborating by mail and/or with git.
• For the sysadmin work, GNUtoo also explained his current work:
  • Issues with the git hosting: There are permission issues with users repositories. Work is done to clarify which permissions are needed and unify the apache, git, gitolite and cgit configurations as there were some discrepancies between some of them. At the time of the meeting we assumed that the issues were fixed but there are still problems with gitolite as pushing got broken.
  • Work on mumble.replicant.us was made to enable this meeting.
• For the work on the SDK builds wizard explained his work:
  • This work is made possible through the combination of many pieces: Starfish maintains an SDK-Rebuilds project that has code to build the SDK. The Taler project gave us some server access, and wizzard is automatizing the builds with forgejo runner and integrating that into a Trisquel container to make sure they also work on an FSDG distribution.
  • A Question was asked about signing the releases. And since the goal is to automatize as much as possible (otherwise maintenance takes too much time) if there are signatures, it would need to be automatized somehow or not done by wizzard.
  • GNUtoo promised to open a new project for the SDK builds (now available here).
  • Due to constraints of the hosting, wizzard needs a Trisquel docker container. So as GNUtoo already worked on projects that create Trisquel containers he promised to producing one that wizzard could reuse.
• GNUtoo and dllud (re-)explained the status of the NLnet work. Basically work was done in GNU Boot instead as we need a bootloader.

Steering committee, Replicant community manager / manager¶

The status of the steering committee was explained. GNUtoo recalled that Fil Bergamo was not very active and wanted to leave (that is now confirmed). The consensus was that dllud will replace Fil Bergamo, and that this will be taken care of before putting out the announce for the Replicant community manager / manager.

For the Replicant community manager / manager:

• we explained why the last call failed (we took too much time to choose a candidate), how it went both from the candidate perspective (they sent a text and then we asked questions to them) and how we did it internally (we first did a first path, and then asked questions to be able to select better the candidate in a second round). This time things will most likely be done in the same way.
• We also discussed where to post the job offer. Beside the official communication of the Replicant project, The FSF jobs website and FOSS jobs were mentioned as possible candidates. Posting the information on jobs website that are too broad were dismissed as many non-free software people also go there and we are looking for people with good knowledge of the free software community.
• We plan to leave 1 month for people to apply once the community manager call is published. The process will most likely take about two months because once the candidate is selected we still need to re-open the talks between Replicant, the FSF and the chosen candidate to discuss the details about hiring (what words to put inside the freelance contract, how to adapt it for Replicant, etc).

When to setup the next meeting.¶

• For the next meeting we also plan to dedicate time for greeting new contributors.

• One person / some people wanted to have the next meeting very soon (like in one or few weeks) but this might not work as we won't have enough public things to discuss. For instance the applications for the community manager / manager will be discussed privately between the steering committee and/or people handling the Replicant contact mailing list, so the details won't be discussed in a future online meeting as applications often contain extremely privacy sensitive information. So this means that when that goes forward, it won't bring much to discuss for the next meeting.

• The next meeting is set up in 2 month hopefully with a new community manager. This way the community manager could also introduce herself/himself for instance.

• Questions were also asked to the participant to see if things went well with Mumble. GNUtoo was concerned about audio quality issues due to the server load but things went fine: The server has often too much load due to access to cgit. But then the Mumble server was configured to have a realtime priority (with dpkg-reconfigure) so that probably made it work without any issue. Since Mumble worked well for most people ('tct' had microphone issues) we chose to use that again for the next meeting.

Non-scheduled topics / questions:¶

• We were asked about the support of phones like the Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300) in the next versions of Replicant. We responded that we won't work on that but that we can still review patches that add support for them. This is because the 2G and 3G are being removed almost everywhere in the world. We explained what it meant and we also explained that it also affected many 4G devices including the Galaxy SIII 4G (GT-I9305) or Galaxy Note II 4G (GT-N7105) because many phones lacked VoLTE which was needed for voice calls and/or SMS to continue working when 3G and 2G are removed.

• Then jack_kekzoz and/or Putti found a way around it for the 4G versions of the Galaxy SIII / Note II and both showed interest on working on it: The lack of VoLTE on these models may be address with IMS / doubango and it can be tested with imsdroid. Then we probably need to integrate something like ims or doubango in Replicant for these phones.

• The Replicant project should probably write an article about 2G and 3G planned obsolescence, how it affects Replicant and why "software" cannot magically make old modems support 5G.

• thatch addressed the need for community communication infrastructures which unfortunately are out-of-scope for the time being as we first would need to run on phones that can use these networks and then support the required hardware (WiFi, Lora add-ons for the PinePhone / Librem5, etc).

• Johannes__dolphinana raised the need for archiving and publishing the #replicant IRC logs. GNUtoo asked Johannes__dolphinana to first look if matterbridge has a logging function as we already use matterbridge . Then he explained that if this didn't work out, running an IRC client and exporting the logs with Apache could work (because Replicant uses Apache). Help on this task is appreciated.

2nd meeting¶

Date, time, location and protocols¶

18 August 2024 19:00 CEST
mumble.replicant.us

Meeting schedule¶

• Greeting of new contributors.
• Status of the steering committee.
• Status of the community manager.
• Verbosity of the meeting report. Should it be as long as the last one? Meeting Frequency.