2025-06-09 - HackMD

``` title: Rust Project Goals 2025-06-09 date: 2025-06-09 url: https://hackmd.io/bqCOIUG8Q2CWBZNfr_SOQw ``` # 2025-06-09 People: Niko, Rémy/lqd, Santiago Pastorino ## Agenda * Review next milestones * May update * 2025H2 * Bot status overview * Review briefly survey contents * Plan for the next few weeks ## May update Q: Do we require flagship updates? Niko: we should push for flagship updates, but we also should have a deadline and not block sending out the other updates. Let's try to get the flagship updates this week and plan for a blog this week. *** Niko: Is the bot even working still? We should have a clean process to write the blog post. Santiago: We need to let people know about the deadlines, maybe change messages? Coordinate the deadlines. Santiago: the last ping should have a different message to increase the urgency. Niko: We shoul probably have a fixed schedule. First week of the month: please post updates. Gradate teh urgency (see below). For the flagship goals the bot could post a PR with the due date and have people add the updates there. Niko: What if we ask people to provide "May tl;dr / June tl;dr" etc. Remy: not everyone uses tl;dr, sometimes I need to update the message. Niko: They get a ping: "we're makyng a May post, it goes out on given date. We include all comments on May. You don't have a tl;dr status yet.". Show a checklist and tell them what we have so far. Remy: when we ping mid-month: feels too soon, but if we don't, then we don't get a response on time. Niko: feels weird being asked about the update for the given month: "I'm still working on it". I'm trying to post regular updates and then the ping is just a reminder. Niko: If they do that, maybe the bot could not remind them at all. I like the idea of letting people opt-out. Niko: I'll open a "mini-rfc-like" issue, ask for comments before we build this. People will understand the process when the bot starts pinging them. ## The Survey Niko: wanted to do a brief overview of the results so far. Scheduling: Goal program starting time. Most people don't have an opinion, small preference towards August. Niko: My concern with August is that during July I won't be here for much. Don't know how realistic this is. *we looked at the survey responses -- eight were provided* Niko: Weaknesses: need to work better on prioritisation, need to integrateee it better. Making sure accepted goals are prioritised over other activities. Too many goals and/or they're not being used to say no to things (by the teams with their limited capacity). Niko: If a goal hasn't received an updat in a month, we could mark it as inactive and not include it in the follow-up blogs (they can activate it by providing updates). Remy: What about someone actually coming to each goal owner and asking them: we haven't seen an update in a while -- do you think it's inactive? Niko: the bot is less personal but also less likely to cause guilt? Probably worth doing both -- having the human follow-up too. Agreement: if there's no update for a month, we should reach out. ## H2 Goals Niko: Previously some people were surprised by the RFC. Some teams were surprised by cross team requests. I want to highlight these -- thinking of having a targeted meeting with all the leads to go over all these goals (or at least the cross-team ones). Remy: Also important to highlight teams that will need to be involved, but weren't explicitly. Niko: As a PR with a new goal proposal: we give some feedback to the owner and then (somehow) shop it around with the target team. For each goal open a new topic in the relevant stream? Don't want the first time they see a goal to be an RFC or a meeting. Niko: We have the project goals stream but that's used for updates for existing goals. People often open topics there when they have a new goal. But it'd be great if when someone opens a PR to add a new goal, it would open a new topic automatically. Have that (new goals) be separate from the topics for accepted goals. Santiago: When people complain about cross-team issues: I wonder whether they've seen the discussions at the right time and if we could avoid this in the future to make sure they do. Niko: I want to segregate the goals to three categories Flagship, goals really important to the team, the rest. There's a false trade-off between having too many goals and that being distracting, but when they're just asking for moral support we don't want to just say no. Important for the funding purpoess or things like cargo-semver-check what can be important going forward but someone needs to prove it first -- but they need to have alignment with the teams. Remy: Can there be an async process happening within the team to discuss their goals once they have enough. E.g. post a list "here are the current compiler goals, discuss?". Have them review, align ahead of time. Niko: For the compiler specifically: have them talk now before the goals are there. "What kind of resource planning should we be doing?" "How should the process be working?" Niko: Post the table of the asks on each team. Make it visible to the team. The team (compiler and lang ideally) could sign up a person as a champion. Goal PRs should have a dedicated reviewer who goes over all of them. Reviewer of the work that'll go into this goal. Remy: I think the compiler team is very divided on this. This will be an interesting discussion. *Remy will open a topic with Niko, Remy, Wesley and Dawidtwco to discuss this.* *Niko will do the same thing with Tyler Mandry* Remy: Flagship goal selection process is a bit ad-hoc. Remy: Can we ask the Council to select the goals? Niko: No. They aren't in the position to be able to fix them. Niko: Flagship H2: async and Rust for Linux are still there. How do we pick the third one? We should get people's input on what should the third one be but not set up a whole process. Santiago: Long term, we want to formally accept this team is going to continue. At the end, Niko (lead) would be deciding the flagship goals. Niko: We should have "North Star" RFCs that would point to the flagship goals. For RfL it would be: "compiles on stable". Have a time expiration (or rewiev every 1-2 years). ## Pings 1. ping the 15th of each month with a 15 days backwards lookup for comments 2. ping the 20th with a 20 days backwards lookup 3. ping the 25th with a 5 days backwards lookup (in this case you'd potentially ping everyone and this would be a reminder for the last chunk of updates before the blog post) 4. blog the 30th with the things we have ## Niko's ideal workflow: Message template Hi @owner! We are preparing the blog post covering month M. Currently we have: * [ ] 0 "May TL;DR" comments * [ ] N comments on the tracking issue(s) Schedule: * [x] 2025-06-01: This reminder // first monday * [ ] 2025-06-09: Next reminder // second monday * [ ] 2025-06-14: Blog post PR opened // second friday * [ ] 2025-06-17: Blog post PR merged // third monday Plan: * For month M: * Scan for a comment entitled "M TL;DR" * Week 1 of month X+1: * Ping that we will be preparing a blog post on month X. Indicate how many comments we've seen * Week ## Action items * May blog post * Flagship goal updates * reach out to Niko (nikomatsakis) * reach out to Tyler Mandry (spastorino) * reach out to Mara (Tomas Sedovic) * write her final update on how RustWeek turned out * Author blog post (lqd) * Author up the new bot process "mini-RFC" * include a reminder there that folks can write a follow-up, perhaps mention * Bot updates * group mesg with t-compiler (lqd) on how they want to handle goal discussion/prio, processes, etc * group mesg with t-lang (tmandry) on how they want to handle goal discussions ## 2025H2 next steps * Public announcement * Schedule overall * "Soft launch" * Hard launch * ... * Draft RFC prepared * Draft RFC reviewed by the team leads * focus on cross-team asks * overall capacity review * Tend to incoming pull requests * One topic in t-compiler, "2025H2 goal proposals" * Post a message: new goal for team X was posted, please leave comments on the PR * * Ideal workflow * Channel `project goals/proposed` * Each PR adding a new goal creates a new topic for feedback on whether to accept the goal, whether its scope is realistic, etc * In the team channels * A "2025H2 goal period" topic * post a link to the goal PR and zulip stream when it is created * Timing this time * Shooting for accepted by September * Timing next time * last 2 months are planning * beginning planning by Oct 31 * involving others to choose flagship goals, at least the 3rd this one (e.g. cross team performance goal discussed at the All Hands)