Public Project Meeting - February 11, 2021

Continuing the series of bi-weekly public project meetings…

Continuing the series of bi-weekly public project meetings, here is the timeline of the meeting held on February 11, 2021,5:30 PM CET. (Below times are on CET)

Meetings are held on the #selenium-tlc channel on Selenium Slack.


Diego Molina 5:31 PM

Agenda for today:

  • General project statistics (Previous meeting: 252 open issues, 35 open PRs, Current: 234, 32 PRs)
  • Anything new to report from the last PLC/SFC call?
  • Overall announcements? New people on committees, with the commit bit, etc?
  • Pending work that needs to be done for the first Beta?
  • CoC, next steps?

@simonstewart @barancev @titusfortner @AutomatedTester

feel free to add more topics

intentionally not pinging Jim, Jim is not able to join

@harsha509 @luke and others, feel free to join as well

Simon Stewart 5:34 PM

@titusfortner wants to add “Remove Edge HTML”

Titus Fortner 5:35 PM

maybe a discussion of the general plan for post beta since it looks like the release is imminent?

Diego Molina 5:35 PM

Alright, first thing to mention is… great job everyone dealing with open PRs and open GH issues!

I don’t remember when we had such a “low” number of issues and PRs

but we can keep making that number smaller :slightly_smiling_face:

first topic: Anything new to report from the last PLC/SFC call?

Alexei Barantsev 5:37 PM

I expect the number of bugreports to go up after beta 1 release date

people will download and try the new version

be prepared :slightly_smiling_face:

Titus Fortner 5:38 PM

hopefully. :)

Luke Hill 5:38 PM

ah right. When are these and “should” I be coming to them? Also is there some form of meeting request with link on e.t.c.

I only ask because the cucumber one which I go to i’ve stuck on my calendar so I don’t forget.

Simon Stewart 5:38 PM

@luke there’s a public calendar we share

There’s something every Thursday at 4:30 UK time

Diego Molina 5:39 PM

I believe this is the link to the calendar, Luke https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=7nmc82h5ok17obircmdu27sghs%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Europe%2FBerlin

Simon Stewart 5:39 PM

We announce here 30 minutes before things kick off

Diego Molina 5:39 PM

So, anything from our first topic?

Anything new to report from the last PLC/SFC call?

Luke Hill 5:40 PM

Rightio, is it just typed in here or is there a video call?

Diego Molina 5:40 PM

only typed

Simon Stewart 5:41 PM

Nothing much to report from the PLC/SFC call

Alexei Barantsev 5:41 PM

re: issues and PR, there is a new contributor to the JS part of the project, https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/pulls/potapovDim I think we should support him as much as possible, he seems to be motivated, I saw he streamed about official selenium JS binding to youtube

Simon Stewart 5:42 PM

We’re waiting for @mmerrell to report back: he was going to reach out to the SFC directly

@barancev +1 for supporting new folks. Anything we can do to help them?

Alexei Barantsev 5:42 PM

the JS part of the crew is traditionally underrepresented… so we should care about JS contributors very much

I’m trying to get into contact with potapovDim to get him more involved

David Burns 5:43 PM

I’ve been trying to make the JS bindings a first class citizen with bazel

I think I have that nearly done

Diego Molina 5:44 PM

ok, the next topic is:

Overall announcements? New people on committees, with the commit bit, etc?

Probably not so much?

Marcus Merrell 5:45 PM

I reached out to SFC about the CoC SOW - Karen responded that she’d look at it “tomorrow” which was last Wednesday. I’ll text her right now to see what she says

David Burns 5:45 PM

cool

our contact for the CoC is still free

Marcus Merrell 5:45 PM

you mean “available”?

David Burns 5:46 PM

No, she has been trying to get back to work but taking it slowly as she is shielding due to covid

Diego Molina 5:47 PM

ok, let’s jump to the main topic then

Pending work that needs to be done for the first Beta?

Simon Stewart 5:47 PM

There’s a few things on my list.

Primarily, the Options classes don’t serialise to a w3c-safe version automatically.

That won’t be hard to fix

David Burns 5:48 PM

My list has Firefox CDP in JS (nearly done)

Simon Stewart 5:48 PM

There’s been a team effort to get the Grid stable. It eats memory, but should work now (@barancev and @diemol can correct me on that)

Diego Molina 5:49 PM

I had these two items on the client side, are the still pending? Make relative locators return elements sorted by proximity Allow locator strategies to be pluggable Enable fallbacks for commands

Alexei Barantsev 5:49 PM

I think that the grid is ready to ship

Jim Evans 5:49 PM

my list is all post-beta1, mostly around refactoring to allow CDP in remote and to enable for firerfox.

Alexei Barantsev 5:49 PM

there is a memory leak, but it’s not critical for the beta

Simon Stewart 5:49 PM

@diemol both of those are done

Titus Fortner 5:50 PM

Firefox CDP shouldn’t need to hold up beta

do we need to fix Options to release beta?

hoping we can release more frequently after we get to beta, just want to know what has to be there for it to be a beta

Diego Molina 5:52 PM

when do we think we can have beta 1 released?

should we set a date for next week?

Titus Fortner 5:52 PM

tonight?

everything is green, so what feature do we need to hold up the release for?

can we do it all in future betas?

Diego Molina 5:53 PM

perhaps the only item is what @simonstewart mentioned?

Simon Stewart 5:53 PM

The Options thing is it, AFAIAC

Titus Fortner 5:54 PM

and we can’t release a beta without it? Is it a user facing change?

Simon Stewart 5:54 PM

It’s suboptimal to not be able to create webdriver instances in java

Titus Fortner 5:54 PM

I completely agree it’s needed

Simon Stewart 5:54 PM

It’s a user-facing change

Titus Fortner 5:54 PM

ok, then :) easy.

David Burns 5:54 PM

I mean… no one uses Java right

Simon Stewart 5:55 PM

Seldom touched.

It’s a niche thing

Jim Evans 5:55 PM

considers changing his name to “no one”

Titus Fortner 5:55 PM

I thought it was an sub-optimized thing that we fix in implementation

but if it changes what a user has to do, then great. Let’s set a date next week? :)

Simon Stewart 5:57 PM

We’ll ship when it’s ready.

But probably next week

Diego Molina 5:58 PM

could we set a tentative date?

So people have it in mind and, if possible, save some time for it

like, we target next Thursday and we touch base on Tuesday to see if we actually can make it, what do you think?

Titus Fortner 6:01 PM

Whatever makes sense to Simon. Ruby stuff should be ready to go on short notice

Simon Stewart 6:03 PM

I’m very time constrained.

But Monday and Tuesday should be selenium days for me

Alexei Barantsev 6:04 PM

let’s ship on Monday then

David Burns 6:04 PM

Python stuff is ready, changelog is already updated

Simon Stewart 6:05 PM

@barancev if everything works on Monday, we ship on Monday

Alexei Barantsev 6:06 PM

yes, if everything works

Titus Fortner 6:06 PM

sounds good to me

excited for it

David Burns 6:06 PM

Let’s not set a date, as much as I want a beta. People will focus on it too much

Diego Molina 6:06 PM

sounds good, my intention was just to drive this conversation :slightly_smiling_face:

Titus Fortner 6:08 PM

Are we ready to talk about removing EdgeHTML? :)

Diego Molina 6:08 PM

got for it

Titus Fortner 6:09 PM

who wants to keep it in Selenium4?

No one? Ok, let’s remove it.

:)

Simon Stewart 6:09 PM

I’m going to let @jimevans make the call

Titus Fortner 6:10 PM

seriously, though, it’ll be less confusing for calling “edge” methods in Se4 to represent the latest instead of having to require people to specify “edge_chrome” and “edge_html”, etc

Simon Stewart 6:10 PM

I’m fine with edge and edgehtml

Titus Fortner 6:10 PM

well “edge” used to be edgehtml

Simon Stewart 6:10 PM

Everyone who’s lazy will get the right thing by accident

Titus Fortner 6:10 PM

so it’s going to be a change either way

but I’m fine with whatever @jimevans decides on it

Jim Evans 6:11 PM

let me make the call regarding EdgeHTML?

Simon Stewart 6:11 PM

Yeah

Titus Fortner 6:12 PM

should we all ditch explicit support for it in Se 4 since MS is forcing people off of it… :)

Alexei Barantsev 6:12 PM

@titusfortner we provide support for IE :slightly_smiling_face:

Titus Fortner 6:13 PM

IE is and will remain special

Diego Molina 6:13 PM

this is about EdgeHTML, not IE, right?

David Burns 6:13 PM

Looks like bwalderman submitted a patch for python to remove it a while back

Titus Fortner 6:13 PM

I think MS can force upgrading from EdgeHTML to Edgium more easily than forcing people to upgrade IE

David Burns 6:13 PM

bwalderman of John Jansen’s team

Alexei Barantsev 6:13 PM

@diemol yes, EdgeHTML, not IE

Jim Evans 6:13 PM

given that they’re doing forced-upgrades of people on EdgeHTML, i’m inclined to remove support for it. sure as we do, you know people will still be like “how do i test against edgehtml, since i don’t give any reflection on what my users are actually using and don’t want to have to think critically.”

is quite cynical today.

David Burns 6:14 PM

so… that was my question really…

Simon Stewart 6:14 PM

I’m down with removing it from the java tree, then

David Burns 6:14 PM

is Sauce dropping support for it?

or magic “here is an old selenium to support it” type code

Titus Fortner 6:15 PM

if the decision were up to me, yes, but it isn’t, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Diego Molina 6:15 PM

to be honest, I don’t know how we are doing it

David Burns 6:16 PM

we could ask your product team especially since they are starting their day or … drop it with a big YOLO

Diego Molina 6:16 PM

but if it is browser that won’t be supported by MS starting on March(?), we will eventually drop it

Titus Fortner 6:16 PM

I can see valid use cases for IE, I don’t see valid use cases for old Edge, and yeah, it’s all complicated since things have changed since 3.141.59

Diego Molina 6:16 PM

goes and asks the team in charge

Titus Fortner 6:17 PM

Dude, we still support running Firefox 4 on Vista

David Burns 6:18 PM

screenshots this for that team if they come moaning…

Titus Fortner 6:18 PM

So, you can test EdgeHTML with MutableCapabilities if you need to

David Burns 6:19 PM

the python code treats them the same, just creates a different service

Titus Fortner 6:21 PM

Titus: supports Jim: inclined to support

anyone else with opinions on keeping it?

it’s really the force upgrades that is pushing me to be more drastic in the recommendation, plus the potential confusion over the method

David Burns 6:22 PM

I’m happy to drop

Diego Molina 6:22 PM

+1 to that

Titus Fortner 6:22 PM

@barancev?

Oh, missed Simon saying he’s good with it

whew, ok, I’ll stop banging on about it :)

thanks

Diego Molina 6:25 PM @titusfortner, maybe you can create a GitHub issue and add labels for each language binding? Then we can track it

Titus Fortner 6:25 PM

Another ask…

Can we create a list of the new features that the bindings need to implement so that we can make sure all the languages are supporting the same things?

Some of the stuff being done in Java I’m not sure if it is grid related or bindings related.

I know Ruby is missing a few things, and I’m not even sure I know which all of them are.

Diego Molina 6:28 PM

I think we would need to go through the changelogs and build that list

David Burns 6:30 PM

@titusfortner thanks for offering to make sure the docs are up to date

Titus Fortner 6:30 PM

Can we make a grid in an issue, or do we need to track it elsewhere

I legit tried to help with the docs, but Go kicked my butt and I threw in the towel

I’m sticking with Jekyll where the OO makes sense :)

Diego Molina 6:31 PM

an issue would be nice

David Burns 6:31 PM

What…

@titusfortner you should watch my twitch… the docs are easy

Diego Molina 6:32 PM

Can we make a grid in an issue, or do we need to track it elsewhere

I am replying to this

lol

David Burns 6:32 PM

The what was for Titus

Diego Molina 6:32 PM

ok, so the meeting time is up, thank you everyone!