I didn't mean to imply the IESG is doing something wrong deliberately.
From personal experience, documents are approved by the IESG
that have unresolved IANA considerations.
Hmm. If memory serves, IANA looks at the documents more-or-less
in parallel with IESG to see if there are any showstoppers.
It's true that some name or number assignments may not yet be
done, but the RFC Editor works closely with IANA. I doubt that
this is a major source of delay.
From observation, documents are approved by the IESG that have
normative reference issues.
True. A document with unpublished normative references is going to
get held up anyway - in either the IESG or RFC Editor's queue.
The RFC Editor does a more thorough check for normative references
than the IESG does (in my experience, though some IESG folks do
look for such things), and in some cases the references are already
in the RFC Editor's queue waiting to be processed (or are themselves
waiting on publication of normative references)
The next event is some months later, when the RFC editor picks
up the document, and authors are notified of the issues. Are
you suggesting that in all, or even most of the cases, authors
are unaware of these issues before the RFC was approved by the IESG?
I don't know about "most" of the cases, but it isn't unusual.
Some author writes document XXXX which refers to document YYYY.
At the time XXXX is written, YYYY is more mature than XXXX and
presumed to be farther along in the process. However YYYY gets
delayed for one reason or another and XXXX gets in the queue
first.
Keith