[cabfpub] Meeting 40 Hackathon

[Ryan Sleevi]

As it sounds like there's more discussion than what was intended to just be
a link to our members Wiki, I'd like to move any future discussion to the
public list.

During Meeting 40, some members have requested time and space to be able to
hold a hackathon related to tooling.

To capture what was shared:
The goal of the hackathon is to spend time on some of the engineering
issues related to improving the tools used to produce CA/Browser Forum
Guidelines. The following are good starting points for discussion:

* Simplify the current Markdown/Weasyprint dependencies?
* Improve the Travis image configuration to version dependencies
* CSS style fixes to better align with current Word-based generated PDFs -
check out the CSS and build scripts at
https://github.com/martinthomson/i-d-template, which produce nice docs like
https://ietf-wg-acme.github.io/acme/.
* Production of redlined Word documents from non-Word sources
* The ability to preview pull requests (Travis for PRs?) - this is done,
see "upload-dir: builds/$TRAVIS_BRANCH" in .travis.yml.
* Cross-platform local generation - can we support easy local generation of
documents, or do they need to use Travis-based tools?
* The ability to automatically produce and archive artifacts for every
version with a common naming scheme or discoverable naming scheme
(gh-pages? S3 buckets? etc?)
* Address Wiki usability issues - Can't change password, WYSIWYG editor,
etc.

Explicit non-goals:
* Mandating particular workflow tools or process. This is solely to improve
the tools for those who want to use them to get to an equivalent level to
the current document production process - of specific Microsoft Word and
Adobe Acrobat versions, with a specific master document.


>From a follow-up thread, it seems some members were still confused, so
here's the reply I posted:

This is about working on tools to help Forum members who wish to use those
tools to be productive.

If you're interested in process, this is not the meeting for you.
If you're wondering how to use these tools, this is not the meeting for you.
If you're worried about changes to the Forum's workmode, this is not the
meeting for you.
If you're happy with Word and Acrobat, this is not the meeting for you.


To restate, this is about focusing on the technical tools and, more
importantly, addressing some of the known technical deficiencies. The goal
is to address these problems with engineering time and focus to the extent
possible.

For those not familiar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon is a useful
background as to the expected approach.
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