General Assembly @ RIOT Summit 2026

2026 General Assembly

Date: Sep 2, 2026 (Confirmed!)

Time: 11:00 CET (Confirmed!)

Moderator: Ann (Tom Hert) :handshake: Miri

Venue: Grenoble :mountain:

VMA forum entry: General Assembly @ RIOT Summit 2026

Previous VMA notes: Notes: Virtual Maintainer Assembly 2026.05

Attendees

  • Lasse Rosenow
  • Tom Hert (Ann)
  • Carl Seifert
  • Lukas Luger
  • Lukas Sebrantke
  • Karl Fessel
  • benpicco
  • Martine
  • Bennet (Teufelchen)
  • Koen
  • Kaspar
  • Karin
  • chrysn
  • Elena
  • Michel
  • Hendrik van Essen
  • Jose
  • Matthias
  • Thomas
  • Marius
  • chrysn
  • Jakob (jhermanowski)
  • Tara
  • Leo Herbst
  • crasbe (remote)

Note taking: Mikolai

Agenda

  • Agenda Bashing - 1’ (Ann/Miri)
  • VMA 2026.11 Moderation - 2’ (Ann/Miri)
  • 2026.07 Release debrief from Release Manager - 5’ (Kevin)
  • Outlook on upcoming 2026.10 Release 5’ (Mikolai/Miri)
  • 2027.01 Release Manager - 1’ (Martine / https://crystalball.riot-os.org/)
  • More active maintainer github admins
  • Should we reduce the release cadence?
  • RIOT & Rust: What is our vision?
  • Community Server: new maintainers (Koen)
  • Updating release specs (jose)
  • AOB

Notes

VMA 2026.11 Moderation - 2’ (Ann/Miri)

Martine volunteers, Ann helps

2025.07 Release debrief from Release Manager - 5’ (Kevin)

  • (Kevin not present)
  • Tom: Kevin just wanted to support, but then had to take over completely. Several issues found in Release tests which he couldn’t fix in time, next release managers will have to look into them.
  • Jose: issues found in lorawan part, which have probably been there for some time.
  • Tom: remember that last release there were also 2 failing tests

Outlook on upcoming 2025.10 Release (Mikolai)

  • Mikolai: unicoap, new docker image, any other big things outstanding?
  • Martine: updating / fixing release tests

2027.01 Release Manager

  • Crystalball selects Lasse
  • Lasse agrees :tada:, Teufelchen will support him

More active maintainer github admins

  • Tom: governance.md says that every stakeholder should have an active admin, right now that is not the case
  • Tom: suggestions were Mikolai (TUD), Teufelchen (HAW)
  • Karin: stakeholders are TUD, HAW, MLPA, Berlin, Frankfurt, TUHH
  • Tom: Hauke, miri, cenk, benpicco, leandro, peter, kevin.
  • benpicco: that’s new to me
  • Thomas: what about crasbe?
  • crasbe: not available at this time
  • Tom: crasbe declined in weekly to not take too much responsibility, currently no other maintainer candidates from TUHH
  • Tom: so Mikolai?
  • no one objects
  • Mikolai agrees
  • Tom: and Teufelchen?
  • no one objects
  • Teufelchen agrees
  • Martine: what to do about cenk, peter, hauke? just remove them?
  • everyone agrees

Should we reduce the release cadence?

  • Tom: came up after discussing current release progress, releases use up a lot of resources. especially straining on working students. also some releases have not so much new features?
  • Kaspar: why does it take longer nowadays?
  • Tom: some of the release test automation is breaking
  • Martine: we will try to improve the automation for next release
  • Thomas: was always the idea to improve the process to reduce the load
  • Tom: so maybe wait with decision for next release and see how release test fixing works out?
  • Karin: what was the original reason for current cadence
  • Kaspar: the longer the cadence, the more we wanted to get into the release, more pressure. fixed cadence was meant to have smaller steps
  • Thomas: meant to be agile process
  • Karin: what would fit the current situation?
  • Thomas: not much has changed IMO
  • Tom: someone raised before: do people even use releases?
  • benpicco: MLPA usually based on some commit on master. but every release is a good checkpoint with tests etc.
  • Tom: proposal to wait for next one
  • no one objects

RIOT & Rust: What is our vision?

  • Tom: spin out of weekly: sth broke in Rust integration
    • crasbe: stuff constantly breaks unfortunately :sweat_smile: (Mikolai: not just in Rust :P)
  • chrysn: setting crates out-of-tree was for experimental state, but also that you could use one crate for several RIOT version. from own experience, I just use latest always. So would now be open for moving in-tree. Would make things much easier fixable.
  • crasbe: before moving in-tree, address the open improvements in the Pull Requests of Rust repos?
  • chrysn: lately little activity from my side but moving in-tree should also make improvements from PRs easier. Will do, as I have a rough plan.

Community Server: new maintainers

  • Koen: currently I am main administrator. I won’t be able to continue. Any volunteers?
  • Koen: what it means in practice: responding to crasbe when CI stops working, fixing disk-full problems. Couple of hours per month of work. Will do handover. Timeframe a month from now.
  • Matthias: which services there?
  • Koen: forum, pretix, pad, CI distribution, parts of the website (apidocs, main, summit, guides), monitoring graphana for CI, crystalball, gitea, some Caddyfiles
  • Kaspar: some Ariel stuff, one docker-compose stack
  • Koen: linux with docker-compose, some external monitoring and database in LXC, tried to make it easy to maintain
  • Mikolai: would volunteer, but only in a team of two people being responsible
  • Martine: can do technical support at least for the beginning
  • Mikolai: want a second person permanently
  • Elena: will be that second person
  • everyone happy

Updating Release Specs

  • José: Maybe redo the release specs, back then not many boards, now many boards, many tests try subset of features, many tests directly tied to barely used boards
  • Jose: proposal to separate features to test from concrete boards. we will not be able to run all on all boards for every release, but we could sweep over boards over different releases
  • Tom: reminds me of HiL discussion
  • Mikolai: but does IoTlab support more boards than what we currently use?
  • Jose: yes, but some of them are broken and are the reason for flaky tests
  • Mikolai: so rather not run automation on IoTlab anymore?
  • Jose: e.g. for LoRa, tests are failing because concrete board is not available, would be better to test with another one it that case and succeed.
  • Mikolai: sounds reasonable
  • crasbe: I have a lot of Nucleo boards (>20) available, but setting up HiL tests is not documented?
  • Tom: there is a lot of prior work, but it is really not trivial to get it to work reliably. someone with quite a lot of time has to tackle this.
  • Thomas: cables are flaky, its difficult. we would need some shield, but that is board-specific.
  • Marius: had issues with lorawan for our product. proposal for HiL: use boards with standard shield form factor, have global bus to distribute to different boards (?). idea similar to jumperlessboard project. but software support needed, not trivial.
  • Martine: example of maribu’s peripheral self-test shield
  • Michel: not the same idea
  • Tom: due to time, move to Breakout sessions

AOB

  • Thank you for moderating, Tom!