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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) A. Cooper Request for Comments: 8875 Cisco Category: Informational P. Hoffman ISSN: 2070-1721 ICANN

                                                           August 2020

                Working Group GitHub Administration

Abstract

 The use of GitHub in IETF working group processes is increasing.
 This document describes uses and conventions for working groups that
 are considering starting to use GitHub.  It does not mandate any
 processes and does not require changes to the processes used by
 current and future working groups not using GitHub.

Status of This Memo

 This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
 published for informational purposes.

 This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
 (IETF).  It represents the consensus of the IETF community.  It has
 received public review and has been approved for publication by the
 Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG).  Not all documents
 approved by the IESG are candidates for any level of Internet
 Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841.

 Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
 and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
 https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8875.

Copyright Notice

 Copyright (c) 2020 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
 document authors.  All rights reserved.

 This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
 Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
 (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
 publication of this document.  Please review these documents
 carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
 to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
 include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
 the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
 described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

 1.  Introduction
 2.  Administrative Process and Conventions
   2.1.  Creation of GitHub Organizations
   2.2.  Migration of an Existing Organization
   2.3.  Personnel Changes
   2.4.  Working Group Closing
   2.5.  Creation of Document Repository
   2.6.  Listing Related Repositories
 3.  Working Group Process
   3.1.  Contributions
   3.2.  Backing Up and Archiving GitHub Content
 4.  Security Considerations
 5.  IANA Considerations
 6.  Informative References
 Authors' Addresses

1. Introduction

 Many IETF working groups and participants make use of GitHub in
 different ways as part of their work on IETF documents.  Some others
 are interested in having their working groups use GitHub to
 facilitate the development of working group documents, but they are
 unfamiliar with how to get started or unclear about which conventions
 to follow.  Some other working groups use or plan to use other code-
 repository services such as GitLab and Bitbucket, which have
 different properties than GitHub.

 This document specifies a set of administrative processes and
 conventions for IETF working groups to use if they choose as a
 working group to use GitHub to facilitate their work.  The
 specifications in this document are not directed at working groups or
 individuals that are already using GitHub to do IETF work.  Practices
 vary among existing working groups, and some of them are not
 consistent with the conventions proposed here: that is fine.  The
 goal of the specifications in this document is not to require
 uniformity in current practice, but to help working groups get
 started using GitHub in a reviewed and validated way, if desired.

2. Administrative Process and Conventions

 This section specifies an administrative process and conventions to
 support the creation and management of GitHub organizations for
 working groups and single-document repositories in a uniform way.
 The steps may be done manually by the IETF Secretariat, or they may
 be automated.  See <https://github.com/richsalz/ietf-gh-scripts> and
 <https://github.com/martinthomson/i-d-template> for working examples
 of automation that is in use in some working groups.

 In this document the question of whether processes should be manual
 or automated is deliberately left unspecified, since these are
 implementation details that the IETF Secretariat and Tools Team will
 address.

 Most of the conventions below are drawn from [RFC8874].

2.1. Creation of GitHub Organizations

 This document specifies that there be a facility in the IETF
 Datatracker (<https://datatracker.ietf.org/>) interface to allow an
 area director (AD) or working group chair to request the creation of
 a GitHub organization for a particular working group.  Ideally, this
 facility would appear both as part of the working group chartering UI
 and the working group page UI.

 When an area director or working group chair makes a request to
 create a GitHub organization, the following process would be
 initiated:

 1.  Create a GitHub organization for the working group.

 2.  Name the organization in the format ietf-wg-<wgname>...

 3.  Initialize the organization by designating the IETF Secretariat
     and the area directors in the working group's area as owners.  If
     the responsible AD for the working group is from another area,
     that AD will be an owner as well.

 4.  Initialize the organization with a team that has administrator
     access.  This team will consist of the working group chairs and
     working group secretary, if one exists.

 After the organization is created, the URL for the organization would
 be added to the working group's page in the Datatracker.

 Steps 3 and 4 above imply that the GitHub identities of the
 organization owners and administrators are known.  Recording GitHub
 identities in the Datatracker (see
 <https://trac.tools.ietf.org/tools/ietfdb/ticket/2548>) would
 facilitate this.  The person requesting the organization would need
 to be notified if the GitHub identities of any of the people meant to
 be owners or administrators were not available.

2.2. Migration of an Existing Organization

 If a working group already has an organization, it would be useful to
 be able to make it have the same management as one would get by going
 through the steps in Section 2.1.  That is, it would be good to be
 able to run Steps 3 and 4 from Section 2.1 so that the rest of the
 activities in this section, such as personnel changes, work the same
 way as for organizations that were created as specified herein.

2.3. Personnel Changes

 When there are personnel changes in the area or the working group,
 those changes would be reflected in the GitHub organization.  There
 should be an ability in the Datatracker to specify that personnel
 changes have occurred.

2.4. Working Group Closing

 When a working group is closed, the team with administrative access
 would be removed, and the owner list would be returned to the
 Secretariat and current ADs at the time of closing.  The organization
 summary and the repositories within the organization would be updated
 to indicate that they are no longer under development.  Later, the
 owner list could become just the Secretariat, or it might include
 others chosen by the Secretariat or the IESG.

2.5. Creation of Document Repository

 There are many different scenarios and configurations where it might
 be useful to have automation or established administrative
 conventions for repositories within WG organizations, such as:

• Creating a new repository for an individual draft (at the

discretion of the WG chair);

• Creating a new repository for an already adopted working group

draft;

• Migrating an existing document repository into the WG

organization; and

• Creating a new repository that contains multiple drafts.

 As an incremental step, this document specifies that there be a
 facility in the Datatracker interface to allow an administrator of an
 ietf-wg-<wgname> organization to request the creation of a new
 repository within that organization for a single document.  The
 document authors would be identified as collaborators.  The
 repository name would be the draft name.  Ideally, the repository
 would be configured with a skeleton draft file, default CONTRIBUTING,
 LICENSE, and README files, and continuous integration support, in the
 vein of <https://github.com/martinthomson/i-d-template>.  Performing
 this step would automatically inform the IETF Secretariat that this
 repository should be backed up as described in Section 3.2.

2.6. Listing Related Repositories

 The IETF Datatracker should allow users to add links to repositories
 (for GitHub and other repository services) on working group,
 document, and user pages.  At the time of this writing, this feature
 was under development.

3. Working Group Process

 [RFC8874] contains discussion of the different possible ways that a
 working group can use GitHub and the large number of decisions
 associated with doing so.  This section specifies a basic set of
 administrative policies for working groups to follow and the
 administrative support needed to carry out those policies.

3.1. Contributions

 At a minimum, every repository created in a working group
 organization needs to incorporate into its CONTRIBUTING file the
 boilerplate text at <https://trustee.ietf.org/license-for-open-
 source-repositories.html> from the IETF license file for open-source
 repositories.  The CONTRIBUTING file can contain other information as
 well (see <https://github.com/ietf/repo-files/tree/master/
 contributing-samples> for examples).

 It would be useful if the user data in the Datatracker could list (at
 a minimum) the GitHub account of the user so that their contributions
 could be tracked more easily.

 Some working groups choose to have more than one draft in a
 repository, particularly for drafts that are tightly linked with
 significant cross-references.  In such a case, the README for the
 repository needs to say so clearly, so that a participant understands
 that changes might be made to multiple drafts at once.

3.2. Backing Up and Archiving GitHub Content

 IETF working group mailing lists are automatically backed up by the
 IETF Secretariat, and the archives are publicly available.  All
 official interactions in a WG must be archived.

 Working group GitHub content also needs to be backed up and publicly
 archived.  This document specifies using the Git protocol
 [git-protocol] itself for both of these tasks.

 Every IETF working group repository on GitHub will have a mirror
 repository of the same name on a server maintained by the IETF
 Secretariat.  Every hour, a service will use the "git fetch" command
 on every GitHub repository that is being tracked.  The mirror
 repository will allow anyone to read the repository.

 Note that this system will not back up GitHub issues or pull
 requests.  These should be backed up as well; the GitHub API allows
 for this.  The IETF Secretariat should back up those at the same time
 as it is backing up the GitHub repositories.

 The steps in Section 2.5 inform the IETF Secretariat which
 repositories should be backed up.  Working group chairs and area
 directors should also be able to request that the IETF Secretariat
 back up additional repositories that are related to IETF working
 groups.

4. Security Considerations

 An attacker who can change the contents of Internet-Drafts,
 particularly late in a working group's process, can possibly cause
 unnoticed changes in protocols that are eventually adopted.

 There is a risk of data loss due to centralization of data in one
 service.  This is recognized and mitigated by the plan described in
 Section 3.2.

5. IANA Considerations

 This document has no IANA actions.

6. Informative References

 [git-protocol]
            Chacon, S. and B. Straub, "Git on the Server - The
            Protocols", in Pro Git, 2014, <https://git-
            scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protocols#The-
            Git-Protocol>.

 [RFC8874]  Thomson, M. and B. Stark, "Working Group GitHub Usage
            Guidance", RFC 8874, DOI 10.17487/RFC8874, August 2020,
            <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8874>.

Authors' Addresses

 Alissa Cooper
 Cisco

 Email: alcoop@cisco.com

 Paul Hoffman
 ICANN

 Email: paul.hoffman@icann.org