After John's note, I've done a little investigating....
- First: WG chair approval of -00 drafts of the form draft-ietf-<wgname>
seems to have been around "forever". I could not find the beginning of it,
but it's at least before London (IETF-51, August 2001).
- After the San Francisco IETF (IETF-56, March 2003), the secretariat
observed that the I-D submissions editor spent significant time chasing
down WG chairs to get approval for -00 WG I-Ds. At the same time, people
were complaining that I-D processing was slow.
The (new) ExDir (Barbara) consulted with me and suggested that we ask the
WG chairs to provide the approval ahead of time, so that the I-D editor
knew what was being approved before the I-D actually arrived.
I agreed that this was worth trying.
- This new deadline was first announced as part of the "important dates"
announcement message for IETF-56, Vienna (August 2003). There seems to have
been no special announcement (in retrospect, this was a mistake).
- Many WG chairs sent in approvals ahead of time as requested. WG -00
drafts coming in without an approval got a bounce message saying "Please
get your WG Chair's approval before the -00 deadline", and if this approval
was received, it got published.
- This continued with IETF-57, IETF-58 and IETF-59. No comments found in
the files I have, so apparently "things worked" - and the I-D publishing
got faster in this period.
- For IETF-60, there was a problem with sending out the announce messages
with the dates *at all* - resulting in the first announcement of the
deadline dates being sent the day before the WG chair approval deadline,
which (naturally) was not appreciated by the WG chairs. This resulted in
this deadline being added to the Web page of "important dates" (as well as
more attention being given to making sure announcements go out).
So, my conclusions from the discussion, tentative:
- Getting enough information to every participant about what the procedures
are at any given moment is hard. But it's always possible to do better.
- Once we discuss procedure, there are many process changes that can be
suggested - some of which are obviously OK, some of which may be
problematic for unexpected reasons.
- Changing the process for IETF-61 is too late.
- The next big change in I-D publication is the one where the tools team
has been trying to gather community input - documented in
draft-ietf-tools-draft-submission (currently at version -04). If the result
of that process is that we can implement this for IETF-62, that will
fundamentally change the dynamics of the process, and we need to discuss
the deadlines in that light.
Hope this helps put the debate in perspective....
Harald
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