[Infrastructure] Separate GitHub Repositories for Each Working Group

Wayne Thayer wthayer at gmail.com
Wed Sep 23 09:47:24 MST 2020


Here is an updated draft announcement based on my understanding of today's
discussion:

The Infrastructure Subcommittee plans to change the structure of the
Forum's GitHub organization to better reflect the evolving structure of the
Forum itself by moving to separate repositories for each working group.
We've discussed a number of ways to accomplish this, and have concluded
that the following steps represent the best approach:

First, we'll clone the "documents" repository to "archive", preserving
branches and commit history.

We'll then rename "documents" to "servercert". This repo will contain the
SCWG Charter, BRs, and EVGLs. GitHub will automatically redirect links from
the old name to the new name, keeping links to the current versions of the
BRs, NCSSRs, and EVGLs functioning.

The "servercert" repo will be forked to create a "forum" repo that retains
commit history for the Charter and other Forum level documents. Non-SCWG
documents will then be deleted from "servercert", and non-Forum docs will
be deleted from "forum".

Also, ALL EXISTING BRANCHES WILL BE DELETED - this means that some redline
links included in old ballots will be broken. Those links can be manually
modified to reference the "archive" repository. This is a tradeoff made to
preserve links to the current versions of SCWG docs and to simplify this
migration.

Finally, we'll create new repositories under the 'cabforum' organization as
follows:
- "code-signing" - Code signing Charter, BRs, and EV code signing guidelines
- "smime" - Charter and BRs for S/MIME certificates
- "tools" - Future location for automation code and other Infrastructure WG
files

The few commits that need to be preserved in these repos will be manually
re-created.

Each repo will have access rights specific to the working group (e.g. SCWG
members won't be able to approve changes to the SMCWG repo).

The "main" branch of each repo will be configured to enforce reviews before
merging a pull request.

The Infrastructure subcommittee proposes that these changes be made on
November 1st if there are no objections. Please respond if you have any
concerns with this proposal.

On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 8:42 AM Ryan Sleevi <sleevi at google.com> wrote:

> I think you're asking two separate things?
>
> There's the branch history (e.g. branches created by Ben and Dimitris for
> merging), which we were holding off just to make sure we dealt with any
> stable links.
> But there's also the commit history (e.g. the history of each commit),
> which allows for line-by-line change history through every change. I
> absolutely use that on a regular basis, and that's one of the things I
> think we should preserve - to be able to git-blame through the ballot
> history. That's why I'm hugely appreciative that Ben actually made each
> ballot a commit, allowing the history to be tracked through the many
> ballots.
>
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 11:31 AM Jos Purvis (jopurvis) <jopurvis at cisco.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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)
>> .:|:.:|:. cisco systems | Cryptographic Services
>> PGP: 0xFD802FEE07D19105 | Controls and Trust Verification
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *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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