[Infrastructure] Draft Minutes - 2021-02-24 Infrastructure Subcommittee Teleconference

[Ryan Sleevi]

# 2021-02-24 Infrastructure Subcommittee Teleconference

## Attendees

Ben Wilson, Corey Bonnell, Dean Coclin, Daniela Hood, Don Sheehy, Inigo
Barreira, Jos Purvis, Pedro Fuentes, Ryan Sleevi Shelley Brewer

## Agenda

   - Approval of Previous Minutes
   - GitHub
      - Branches
      - Tooling
      - Tables
      - HTML
   - Website
      - Layout
      - Tooling
   - Membership Management
   - Mail Server
      - Outbound
      - Inbound
   - Any Other Business

Jos read the Antitrust statement.

## Approval of Previous Minutes

There were some delays getting the previous minutes out, and so the
2021-01-13 and 2021-01-27 minutes had not yet been approved. Hearing no
objections, they were approved as final.

Minutes for the 2021-02-10 minutes have not yet been approved.

## GitHub

### Branches

Ryan shared that he had removed the stale branches from the
cabforum/servercert repository, as discussed as part of the GitHub
migration plan. The remaining branches are 'master', which was an oversight
and can be removed, and SC39, which is still finishing IP review. There is
an automatically generated branch relating to the old infrastructure that
will be deleted once SC41v2 is merged.

### Tooling

Ryan shared that the S/MIME CWG is now set up with the tooling. Unlike the
other CWGs, because the SMCWG did not yet have any documents, the GitHub
migration had not set up an initial commit, and so that caused some
limitations for the web interface. From the Infrastructure Slack, Stephen
Davidson had raised it, and Ryan worked with Stephen and Corey so that
there is now an initial README, an empty document version, and the tooling
is now integrated and running.

Ryan mentioned that this is stuff to consider the next time we create a
CWG, but given that the odds of creating CWGs often is very low, it
probably doesn't need to be formally documented as a procedure.

### Tables

Ryan shared that there had not been much progress on tables. Currently, he
has a branch set up in his repository exploring pantable and
pandoc-list-table, two different ways of creating tables with structured
block elements. Pandoc, and markdown in general, does not lend itself well
to tables that need inline block content, such as lists, and so these
alternative tools allow using CSV or bulleted lists to generate tables from
that.

However, he shared he wasn't sure if either would be necessary, as he
continues working on certificate profiles for the validation subcommittee
of the Server Certificate Working Group, and is exploring how to
communicate profiles without requiring inline block content. In particular,
inline block content such as bulleted lists of "If X, then this, if Y, then
that" may be better expressed as separate tables, rather than putting such
conditions within the table cells themselves. He'll continue working to
identify feature gaps that may be better addressed by these tools.

### HTML support

Support for generating HTML is still on the roadmap, but no progress has
been made since our last call.

## Website

### Layout

On the previous call, the mindmap that Ben had created for the website was
discussed, and following the call, Ben shared the latest version. He
indicated he had not had a chance to work more on it since our last call.

Ben was hoping to have something more to discuss at the face to face, but
had not yet requested an agenda slot, in order to get things into a more
final state. He wanted to make a more concrete proposal to help focus the
discussion.

Jos suggested that the F2F might be an opportunity to gather feedback from
the Forum at large about the website. In particular, what are members
wanting from the website, and how well does the current website meet their
needs. Ben suggested 15 minutes might be good for that, and Jos stated he'd
add it to the F2F Agenda

### Tooling

Jos raised the matter of Wordpress. While our priority is to get the
content up to date and accurate for the website, something to consider for
making the website easier to update is to consider transitioning from
Wordpress to a static site builder. Static site builders are increasingly
common for modern websites, in which a website is managed in Git/GitHub,
and automatically deployed whenever there is a commit. This would make it
easier for folks to propose and preview edits to the website, without
having to be familiar with the Wordpress configuration for the CA/B Forum.

Ben raised a concern that he wasn't sure if folks would feel that's too
much process. While it makes sense for our documents, would needing to get
approvals for edits to the website slow things down, e.g. for chairs
posting minutes? Jos agreed it was a valid concern, but suggested there are
options to balance that.

Jos also raised the concern about whether people are more comfortable in
Wordpress, once they're using it. The interface is very WYSIWYG, which can
be more accessible than figuring out the GitHub interface or other tooling.

This is something to consider in the longer term, and Jos was going to
continue exploring.

## Membership Management

Dean mentioned several requests for membership changes had come in, and
he'd been directing folks to fill out the form, so in the interim, it seems
to be working.

## Mail Server

### Outbound

Ryan brought up the topic of SMTP outbound mail again, as a way of getting
GitHub digests being sent to the lists. He highlighted that there had
recently been a lot of discussion on GitHub, and so being able to reflect
that to the lists would be good. To do that, we just need an SMTP server,
username, and password to send mail as. He wasn't sure if this was
something that we could just use SES for, or whether it required additional
set up.

Jos stated he'd talked to Jim Gorz at GoDaddy, and he was optimistic that
there was a path forward for this. It may just be a matter of running an
SMTP server on a non-standard port, as Amazon blocks inbound port 25. Jos
wasn't sure if SES only accepts mail from inside Amazon infrastructure, or
if it might be as simple as just pointing GitHub to the SES servers.

Jos indicated he'd continue working on this.

### Inbound

Jos mentioned that for inbound mail, e.g. to set up a GitHub bot account,
he's also optimistic there's a path forward. It may be just a matter of
spooling the mail to a file on disk on the server, and reading that with
e.g. mutt or pine. Alternatively, we could consider just having the mail
reflect to one of our lists, such as the infrastructure list.

## Any Other Business

The teleconference on 2021-03-03 is cancelled, due to the CA/Browser Forum
F2F.

The next teleconference is on 2021-03-10.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cabforum.org/pipermail/infrastructure/attachments/20210224/36ad5dc6/attachment.html>