[TOOLS-DEVELOPMENT] Tools Team Report -- 28 December 2018

[Russ Housley <[e-mail]>]

Tools Team Report -- 28 December 2018

1. Datatracker Projects
   - The merge plan was recently updated.
     -- See http://trac.tools.ietf.org/tools/ietfdb/wiki/MergePlan
     -- One thing to highlight is the recent addition of commands that
        will make it easier to load some portions of the database from a
        backup copy.  These commands will make it easier to recover in
        the future from "over-eager" record deletion.
   - More that 1100 old RFCs show no authors in the Datatracker.  This
     situation is because Datatracker is managing workflow, not trying
     to provide history from the beginning of time.  For RFCs prior to
     about RFC 3000, the data is from scraping the RFC files, which are
     in mant different formats.  Manual clean up would requires a good
     bit of time, and there are several cases where there is no right
     answer, such as RFC 2134 and RFC 2319.  This leads to inaccurate
     statistics being displayed by the Datatracker.  As a result, a
     disclaimer will be added to the statistics pages, such as
     https://datatracker.ietf.org/stats/document/authors/?type=rfc.

2. Community & Other Projects
   - The Tools Team is working to discontinue MHonArc email archives.
     This will allow all of the mail-related tools to work from one
     copy of the archives in maildir format.  Mail list discussion on
     the removal of the MHonArc email archives raised three points:
     -- The mailarch application serves the plaintext version of a
        multipart MIME messages; sometimes the HTML version is more
        useful, but it can also be an attack vector.
     -- The obsolete IE8 browser is not displaying mail archive
        content well.
     -- The mail archive tool allows export of selected messages in
        either maildir or mbox format after login.  The login is
        required because multiple anonymous large exports creates a
        performance degradation.  It might be possible to allow
        export of a small number of messages without being login in
        the future.

3. RFC Services Projects
   - RFC Format contracts are on schedule:
     -- IDnits
     -- Publication Formatter
     -- Text Submission
     -- RFClint
     -- SVGcheck
     -- XMLdiff
   - These are all on schedule for initial versions by the end of 2018.

4. Server Infrastructure
   - The custom DMARC-handling software was deployed for all mail lists
     in June 2018, but there is a desire to move away from the custom
     software to ARC.  The ARC software cannot be configured to handle
     just a few of our mail lists.  Requirements were provided to the
     ARC developers, but so far, they have not offered a release date.
     Alexey offered to help get a response from the developers.

5. YANG Catalog
   - Planning for the operation of the yangcatalog.org to be transferred
     to the IETF Secretariat is underway.  Money for the transition is
     part of the IETF LLC budget for 2019.  The current expectation is
     that will happen shortly after the new year.
     -- The open source code for yangcatalog.com uses the Apache 2.0
        License.  All other projects use the  Simplified BSD License.
        The IETF Trust is willing to proceed with this project under the
        Apache 2.0 License.
     -- The registration for yangcatalog.com needs to be transferred to
        the IETF Trust before the site can move to a tools-team-driven
        maintenance model.
     -- Requirements for new features are being gathered.  This will
        lead to a small project in early 2019.

6. Other Business
   - The IMAP server code that is provided by ISODE does not handle
     changed usernames well.  A new release fixes this issue, and it
     is being tested by the Secretariat.  If all goes well, it will be
     deployed in January 2019.
   - A draft Statement of Work for enhancements to the Datatracker
     meeting scheduling tools is being developed.  We expect to put it
     out for bids in early 2019.
   - We are preparing the RFC Production Center code for publication as
     open source.  Robert is writing a draft of Statement of Work for a
     security review of these tools in preparation for them becoming
     public.