[cabfpub] Ballots 154 and 155 - Convert to RFC 3647 Framework and GitHub

Gervase Markham gerv at mozilla.org
Sun Nov 8 20:10:50 UTC 2015


On 08/11/15 19:59, kirk_hall at trendmicro.com wrote:
> 1.  I'm puzzled by the phrase " official canonical version".  

I merely mean "the place everyone is supposed to give as an answer to
the question: "where do I get an official copy of the latest EV
guidelines?". Currently, the answer to that is "download the .doc or
.pdf from the website." Those are the official canonical versions.

There may be other conversions or versions floating around, but they are
not canonical - i.e. you should not rely on them being complete or
up-to-date, because the CAB Forum does not guarantee that any other
copies anyone else might be providing will be complete or up-to-date. We
maintain the canonical version, and we maintain it on our website in two
particular formats.

> 2.  On converting the EVGL and Network Security requirements to an RFC
> 3647 format -- I wasn’t the one, but one or two people were enthusiastic
> about merging the BRs, the EVGL, and the Network Security guidelines
> into a single document once they were all in 3647 format.  If that's one
> of the goals of this ballot -- to make merger possible -- then the
> Working Group will have to avoid a number clash between the three
> documents (otherwise, you could have multiple Sections 3.2, etc. with
> the same numbers -- confusion). 

No. Again, as was gone over in the meeting: people want the _ability_ to
merge and make their own unofficial merges; it is no part of the plan to
merge the official versions. Exactly how they do that merge, and deal
with section number clashes, is up to them. I proposed 3 possible ways,
just to put your mind at rest that those ways exist and the people who
want to do this are not faced with a technical impossibility.

> As to your other suggestion – that the numbers can clash and be the same
> in the different documents, and just use notations such as [EV]3.2.1
> versus [BR]3.2.1 – how is this really useful to anyone?  What’s the
> point of the conversion in that case?

<sigh> My suggested notation was a suggested notation that the people
making these unofficial merged versions may or may not choose to use. If
you don't like it, when you make a merged version for Trend Micro, then
use a different mechanism. Or, if you don't want to make a merged
version, stop worrying about the (trivial) problems faced by people who
do :-)

> If there are people dying to know _where_ the provisions of the current
> EVGL and Network Security guidelines would fit in the RFC 3547 format,
> why don’t you just add a basic table in each document, for example “EVGL
> Section 11 = RFC  3647 Section 3.2”.  That could be completed in an hour.

Because such a table would not be machine-readable. The point of the
conversion to RFC 3647 format is that it makes it _possible_ for humans
to ask machines to merge the documents into unofficial versions which
may be useful to those humans. That would not be possible with a table,
or if the documents remain mastered in .doc rather than Markdown.

Gerv



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