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Re: indication of internet-draft status

2005-03-02 17:09:49


On Wednesday, March 02, 2005 06:39:24 PM -0500 stanislav shalunov <shalunov(_at_)internet2(_dot_)edu> wrote:

Context: The IETF Tools team works on requirements for various
automated tools for the IETF.  Many of the tools have to deal with
internet-drafts; in these cases, the information whether an
internet-draft is a working group draft or a personal draft is
important.  The mechanism by which such information is kept thus needs
to be known to the tools and, correspondingly, reflected in the
requirements.

There appear to be at least three conceivable ways of keeping the
information about internet-draft status:

1. Internet-draft name: working group internet-drafts are always named
   "draft-ietf-*", while personal drafts do not match this pattern.
   For a working group internet-draft, the third component of the file
   name is the working group abbreviation.  When a personal
   internet-draft becomes a working group item, or when a working
   group item is no longer one, or when an internet-draft changes the
   working group, the internet-draft gets republished under a new
   name, without exception.  (This could be automated in a way that
   would ensure that name history is consistently and reliably
   captured.)

2. Metadata kept separately: the file name has nothing to do with the
   status, which is kept separately.  The file name is stable and
   never changes (other than the version number).  The working group
   status is prominently indicated by all tools (in announcement
   subject lines, etc.).

This vastly oversimplifies the situation, not leastwise by assuming that WG affiliation is the only interesting piece of metadata. There are really a lot of questions here:

- MUST draft filenames change to reflect WG ownership?
- MUST the "title" part of a draft be unique across all drafts?
- Does the version number reset to 00 when WG ownership changes?
- Which deadlines apply when?  Is this based on version or history?
- If a filename changes, how are the old and new files tied together?

A lot of these are policy issues, not really within the scope of defining tools behaviour. Good tools will be able to deal with the various possible answers as we adjust policy based on whining and experimentation.

With regard to design and implementation of tools, I think there is a principle which applies here. Filenames are JUST NAMES; their value is in their meaning to the humans who use them. They are not metadata, and software should not infer metadata from filenames any more than it should infer what services a host provides from its domain name (see other thread). Any I-D metadata needed by tools should be maintained in a suitable database, separate from the filenames, which tools should use _only_ to access files and as user-visible labels.

Note that this principle does not require either (1) or (2) above, and it certainly does not require (3). In fact, it has the flexibility to support any of these scenarios, by making tools NOT CARE about what policies we choose to adopt for filenames. This is appropriate; tools should never dictate policy.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+(_at_)cmu(_dot_)edu>
  Sr. Research Systems Programmer
  School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
  Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA


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