[Infrastructure] Separate GitHub Repositories for Each Working Group

Thu Sep 10 08:31:18 MST 2020

One question that came up in our discussion was how frequently anyone refers back to the old branches or changes that are part of the git history for /documents. Obviously the more recent changes are sometimes still relevant, but I’ve yet to find anyone deep-referencing something from the 100-branch of the ballot history for the BRs. And if someone wanted to do that, the history would all still be there under /documents, unchanged, and you could even git-compare /documents/docs/BR.md (or a historical version of it) with /scwg/docs/BR.md, no?

I guess I’m wondering how much effort to spend focusing on preserving that history in each of the document trees vs. creating each new WG tree clean and letting /documents become /archive and retain that history for reference.

-- 
Jos Purvis (jopurvis at cisco.com)
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From: Infrastructure <infrastructure-bounces at cabforum.org> on behalf of Ryan Sleevi <sleevi at google.com>
Date: Wednesday, September 9, 2020 at 3:04 PM
To: Wayne Thayer <wthayer at gmail.com>
Cc: "infrastructure at cabforum.org" <infrastructure at cabforum.org>
Subject: Re: [Infrastructure] Separate GitHub Repositories for Each Working Group

On Wed, Sep 9, 2020 at 12:37 PM Wayne Thayer <wthayer at gmail.com> wrote:

We discussed this proposal on today's Infrastructure subcommittee call.

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 9:46 AM Wayne Thayer <wthayer at gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Ryan - this is helpful.

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 9:32 AM Ryan Sleevi <sleevi at google.com> wrote:

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 12:16 PM Wayne Thayer <wthayer at gmail.com> wrote:

During last week's Infrastructure call, Ben, Jos, and I discussed the proposal to split https://github.com/cabforum/documents/ into separate repositories for each WG's documents.

FWIW, I tried for 10 minutes to get into the call before giving up. Can we get this worked out for the next call? Had the same problem with our prior call as well.

No one has been able to start the meeting. Jos is working with the WebEx team to get his account fixed.

I don't believe that we need to create a ballot to proceed with this change, but I suggested that we should announce the change on the public list and give members a chance to object to it. Here is what I think we want to propose:

================

The Infrastructure Subcommittee plans to change the structure of the Forum's GitHub organization to better reflect the evolving structure of the Forum itself.

We'll create new repositories under the 'cabforum' organization as follows:

- "forum" - contains the Bylaws (and potentially IPR agreement and other Forum level docs)

- "servercert" - Charter, BRs, and EVGLs

- "code-signing" - Code signing Charter, BRs, and EV code signing guidelines

- "smime" - Charter and BRs for S/MIME certificates

- "tools" - automation code and other Infrastructure WG files

"tools" is a bit TBD right now. That's specifically a large scale of work (to work out the CI integration and templates and figuring out if we're doing cross-repo syncs). So let's just place this as "TBD". I think just focusing on the main work products sounds good.

I think this means that all of the automation for producing the documents would initially be duplicated in each repo. We agreed that is a good approach because it allows us to proceed with the separate repos sooner. Then a subsequent task would be to consolidate the automation for all the repos into the 'tools' repo so that the Infrastructure subcommittee can more easily maintain it.

As I wasn't able to make the call, I'm not sure what was discussed for cabforum/documents - is that being renamed to that it will automatically redirect? I think we should, and should to servercert rather than forum, but that wasn't clear.

That makes sense.

We decided that it would be best to consider cabforum/documents a legacy repo, set it to read-only, and possibly rename it to 'archive' rather than repurposing it as either the forum level repo or the SCWG repo.

Thanks, but I think I'm still concerned about this. Can folks share the rationale?

Ben is proceeding with some branch cleanup work, but in today's call we decided that keeping the cabforum/documents repo intact as an archive would allow us to create the new repos from scratch without copying over history and branches. We can proceed with this approach to creating the new repos without branch cleanup in the cabforum/documents repo.

I'm not sure this is good either, and hoping to share the rationale. I do not think breaking the version history into multiple repositories is at all consistent with our goals for moving to versioned artifacts to begin with, and I'm concerned that just like our Wiki migrations, we'll lose important change control history that remains relevant.

Is the sole goal just "do something sooner?" Or are there other reasons? 

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