Subject: [TOOLS-DEVELOPMENT] Tools Team Report -- 26 May 2019

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 May 2019 13:30:38 -0400

Tools Team Report -- 26 May 2019

1. Datatracker Projects
   - The plan was recently updated.
     -- https://trac.tools.ietf.org/tools/ietfdb/browser/trunk/PLAN
     -- One thing to highlight is the increased the priority of the
        transition from Python 2 to Python 3.  This increased priority
        is because Python 2 is being officially deprecated, and it 
        will not receive maintenance starting January 2020.
   - A contract for Meeting Application Improvements was awarded to
     IOLA.  Work will begin shortly.
   - An RFP for IRSG balloting was released and then the period to bid
     was extended to 4 June 2019.  We expect work to begin in June 2019.

2. Community & Other Projects
   - The latest website deliverable from Torchbox is complete, including
     the cleanup of messy redirects between Wagtail and Apache.
   - Handling of 404 on the Wagtail website was improved, avoiding some
     problems that could occur with dynamic links.
   - The Tools Team and the Secretariat are working on a plan for the
     best way to handle static plaintext pages, such as appeals, appeal
     responses, and implementation reports.  Current thinking is to
     manage these outside Wagtail, but the discussion is still ongoing.

3. RFC Services Projects
   - Support for the v3 schema has been enabled for I-D submission, and
     now the IESG needs to make a policy decision about when I-Ds in the
     new format can be submitted to the IESG for publication on the IETF
     stream.
   - The RFC Production Center continues to test the new format tools.
   - The Tools Team has a Statement of Work for the security of the
     tools used by the RFC Production Center.  The new format tools will
     be reviewed once the tools related to the old format are put in
     mothballs.
   - A contract for rendering errata in a more useful was awarded to
     Soaring Hawk Consulting; work began in May 2019.

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 continues to try to get a response from the ARC developers,
     but so far we are only getting silence.  This has not changed in
     many months; maybe we will be using our custom code forever.
   - The guides.ietf.org has been deployed in its own container.  In a
     few weeks we expect to move it to hardware controlled by the
     Secretariat.  This experiment is allowing the Tools Team to
     determine whether other services can be containerized and put
     "in the cloud".

5. YANG Catalog
   - Operation of the yangcatalog.org was to transferred to the IETF
     Secretariat.  A few significant things to highlight:
     -- The yangcatalog.org service is running on different hardware
        than ietf.org; it is on a server in Canada.  This placement is
        allowing the Tools Team to determine whether other services can
        be containerized and put "in the cloud".