ietf-822
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Re: Time to act: draft-klyne-msghdr-registry

2002-02-13 08:15:42

No.  I am talking about getting non-AD folks to do review work.  That is, I
am talking about exactly the kind of task being discussed here.

I agree that it is very hard to get people to do good reviews of detailed
proposals.   Sometimes the best solution is to form a working group, but 
WGs take up AD resources also, and good WG chairs are also hard to find.

For the existing registries that come to mind, the review process doesn't 
seem especially burdensome on the person doing the review.  But for those 
registries the effect of adding a new number or name is fairly well-bounded,
and this isn't true for header fields.  IMHO X-Face or X-Priority wouldn't
be terribly difficult to review, because their effects are also well-bounded.
OTOH, something that attempts to fix the problems with reply would be more
difficult to review, because it's harder to understand the effect that
a proposal would have on the mail system.

So I agree that review of new header fields will sometimes be difficult.
This is one reason that I think the reviewer ought to be able to say
"this is something that requires IETF consensus before it is approved"
(even if it appears in the registry in the meantime)

But the very reason that the review is difficult is also the reason that
we need review of such proposals - we need to understand the likely 
impact of the change before we recommend deployment (or not).

In general, it easy to come up with lots of potentially good ideas ,
much more difficult to understand which ones really work in practice.

Keith