On Oct 29, 2010, at 4:54 AM, t.petch wrote:
By contrast, the delays in producing an RFC seem to revolve around WG process,
where Last Call causes people to come out of the woodwork with delaying
suggestions, something a good chair or AD would stamp on, and IESG process,
where certain hot buttons - eg security, flow control - produce some ludicrous
DISCUSS' which delay the process for months.
Tom Petch
What I get from this is that the entire community needs to be involved in
review and input of future RFCs much earlier in the process than Last Call. In
my experience, the problem is generally not that the people "coming out of the
woodwork" are making irrelevant suggestions, because IESG is fairly good at
ignoring these. The problem seems to be that by the time a document as reached
Last Call, the working group is past the point where it can meaningfully
consider input from outside for anything but the most trivial changes - and the
problems identified in Last Call are often much more fundamental than that.
Often in my experience, outside reviewers and IESG members have been compelled
to try to suggest minor wording changes to address what they saw as fundamental
problems of architecture or scope in the proposed protocol.
And yet, there are far too many Internet-Drafts published for the community to
notice and consistently provide early review of every proposal, and far too
many WGs even in a particular subject area to permit most community members to
keep track of those documents and WGs with which they might be concerned.
I'm not sure exactly where this leads, but I'm sort of thinking it might be
nice if there were a "First Call" for community review much earlier in a
document's life cycle. The I-D associated with a First Call should outline
the solution that is being proposed, and all of the major considerations (e.g.
security) should be dealt with - though perhaps not specified in detail.
There wouldn't be any expectation that the document should be polished, that
every aspect of the protocol being proposed should be nailed down, every option
defined, every reference included or current, and so forth. The First Call I-D
would not be published as an RFC, unless perhaps the WG died prematurely and
there were a desire to publish it as Informational. It's just an I-D for which
the WG requests wide community review.
The WG would be expected to take First Call comments seriously and to report to
the responsible AD how it was considering First Call comments into account in
the development of its protocol. The tradeoff is that WGs would not be
expected to deal with major structural/scope challenges at Last Call -
provided, of course that they hadn't changed the structure/scope drastically
from First Call.
Obviously this is not even half-baked yet. Biggest problem I see is that the
community would initially have no idea what level of detail should be specified
by First Call. Some well-written (but incomplete!) examples, perhaps of
imagined First Calls for well-established protocols, or early Internet-Drafts
for protocols that were eventually standardized, might help. There are lots
of other potential problems also. But in general I think the idea of getting
earlier community feedback is a sound one.
Keith
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