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Re: archives (was The other parts of the report....

2004-09-11 05:00:49
Dear Harald-the-General-AD,

Can we PLEASE do as Melinda says - change the policy now for new drafts? so we can stop having part of this conversation and, in the meantime, stop making the problem worse?

I review documents for Harald as part of Gen-ART. It is really nice to be able to look back at previous versions of a draft and see what's been changing. I can trivially do this on a number of other sites, but not on the IETF site. This defines "dumb".

Henrik Levkowetz from the Proto team showed me a beautiful "history of the draft from 00 to RFC, including ID-Tracker" prototype in San Diego - but we can't implement it with our current boilerplate. This defines "dumber".

And we know that poor documentation of where we've been before is a problem. We've even reached IETF consensus on this. From RFC 3774:

2.7.  Working Group Dynamics can make Issue Closure Difficult

The IETF appears to be poor at making timely and reasonable decisions
  that can be guaranteed to be adhered to during the remainder of a
  process or until shown to be incorrect.

... deleted down to

  Participants are frequently allowed to re-open previously closed
  issues just to replay parts of the previous discussion without
  introducing new material.  This may be either because the decision
  has not been clearly documented, or it may be a maneuver to try to
  get a decision changed because the participant did not concur with
the consensus originally. In either case, revisiting decisions stops
  the process from moving forward, and in the worst cases, can
  completely derail a working group.

Please note that 3774 is Informational - it is pointedly NOT a "Best Current Practice"!!!

Is this a change that requires the IPR working group to express an opinion, or can we just do it? and stop vaguely pointing new participants with recycled ideas to "the mailing list", some of which have been in existence since before HTTP/0.9?

Spencer

From: "Melinda Shore" <mshore(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>


On the other hand, I'd hate to see indecision about what to do
about old ids seep into indecision about what to do about new
ids going forward.  It seems to me that a new policy saying that
any ids submitted in the future will be archived by the IETF unless
the authors object is far better than allowing the current
situation to continue.



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