Re: [MAINTAINER SUMMIT] Folios as a potential Kernel/Maintainers Summit topic?

Chris Mason
2021-09-17T14:37:02Z

> On Sep 17, 2021, at 9:00 AM, James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2021-09-17 at 08:36 -0400, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
>> On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 07:14:11AM -0400, James Bottomley wrote:
>>>> I would caution that Google docs aren't universally accessible.
>>>> China blocks access to many Google resources, and now Russia
>>>> purportedly does the same. Perhaps a similar effect can be
>>>> reached with a git repository with limited commit access? At
>>>> least then commits can be attested to individual authors.
>>>
>>> In days of old, when knights were bold and cloud silos weren't
>>> invented, we had an ancient magic handed down by the old gods who
>>> spoke non type safe languages. They called it wiki and etherpad
>>> ... could we make use of such tools today without committing heresy
>>> against our cloud overlords?
>>
>> You mean, like https://pad.kernel.org ? :)
>>
>> However, a large part of why I was suggesting a git repo is because
>> it is automatically redistributable, clonable, and verifiable using
>> builtin git tools. We have end-to-end attestation with git, but we
>> don't have it with etherpad or a wiki. If the goal is to use a
>> document that solicits acks and other input across subsystems, then
>> having a tamper-evident backend may be important.
>
> I think the goal is to have a living document that records who should
> ack, what the design goals are who has what current concerns and how
> they're being addressed and what the status of the patch set is.
> Actually collecting acks for the patches would be the job of the author
> as it is today and verification would be via the public lists.

Thanks Konstantin for bringing up issues with google docs. I assumed different groups of people would store state differently, but didn’t think of this problem. One nice feature about google docs is you can mark issues as resolved etc, but obviously people can simulate that in other ways with etherpad.

-chris