August 21 meeting minutes

Attendees:

• Conference face-to-face (Jon and Matt)

  • Set aside Monday afternoon for a joint Foundation BAC and TAC

  • Also please volunteer for BAC/TAC panel.

  • There could be a slot in the conference for anything a BAC or TAC would like to present (Nicola)

• General Discussion group  (Jon)

  • Should we have voting in the general discussion (Nicola)

  • Voting carries a risk bigger and louder groups would dominate over other groups (Matt)

  • Anyone can open a poll in the individual communities (Tomas)

  • Figuring out how to start a poll isn’t easy on Loomio at the moment (Nicola)

  • The rules/guidelines for the general group could discourage polls in that group and instruct people on how to create a poll in an individual community (Nicola)

• Maybe a conversation about the election process? (Either at the conference or general discussion) (Nicola)

  • Do we have the right communities? (Igor)

  • Are we missing downstream maintainers? (Dmitry)

  • When setting up the communities, open source maintainers were considered, but it wasn’t clear what the criteria for joining would be. (Matt)

  • There will be people across multiple communities and this was considered from the start. (Tomas)

  • The concern is people over-voting in several communities (Tomas)

• Escalation strategy (Jon)

  • What sort of things need the label? Anything that needs to be discussed outside of the context of the issue or PR. (Matt)

  • I missed a step: there should be a link posted on the issue to any general discussion. (Jon)

  • If there are many issues labeled, we need a step to filter the issues to be considered. (Dmitry)

  • If there is general agreement in the discussion before it reaches the TAC, we can remove the label then. (Tomas)

• Draft PR for support of EVP_SKEY inhttps://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/28278 OSSL_STORE and general improvement of EVP_SKEY (https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/25908) (Dmitry)

• Constant-time BIGNUM (Matt)

  • Sovereign Tech Fund is investing in implementing constant-time BIGNUM

  • Richard is working on a design document

  • Fixed-num API where the size is fixed and BIGNUM would be a wrapper around that. (Richard)

  • Would this be used for numbers that could fit in 64-bits or would this be reserved for larger numbers? (Nicola)

    • Not sure. (Richard)

  • Will the fixed-num allow for different implementations under the hood? (Nicola)

    • The current plan is to just do what BIGNUM does now but with a constant time. (Tomas)

  • When the design document is ready to review we’ll create a PR so that anyone (including the TAC) can review it. (Matt)

• The other part of the Sovereign Tech Fund project is clearing out backlog issues. (Tomas)

  • Is the Foundation hiring to address this issue? (Nicola)

Action items

• Create the General Discussion group (Jon)

• Start discussion about the BAC/TAC election process before the next election (Nicola)

• Initial review of https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/28278 (Matt to assign)