on 2005-03-21 2:15 pm John C Klensin said the following:
Two observations, merely historical, rather than suggestions for
the present or future...
[...]
And, having said this ... one significant difference between
the IETF model and the IEEE model (as of two years ago, I
haven't been attending recently) is that IEEE working groups
usually rev documents once or twice while they are together
face-to-face, one idea being to make sure that we are all on
the same page while we can still have ANOTHER high-bandwidth
exchange to resolve issues that came up with a new revision.
Some working groups do this in spite of the ID blackout period
(by posting URLs to working group mailing lists), but the ID
blackout period does seem to say we're not terribly interested
in making sure that we have "agreement in the room", before we
try to achieve "consensus on the mailing list".
The ancient historical origin of the posting deadlines was
simply the fact that the secretariat could not simultaneously
get I-Ds posted and operate a meeting. For some time, we had a
site, usually operated by volunteers on a rotating basis, to
which unedited updated drafts and other materials could be
posted immediately before and during the meeting only. The
greater amount of IETF activity (number of WGs and attendance)
and more hostile environment today would probably require more
procedures and/or human involvement today, but the intent was to
be make to get late updates and during-meeting updates,
available on an almost immediate basis. Perhaps we have lost
something by letting those mechanisms quietly atrophy. Speaking
personally, I certainly see no problem with the "post URL to WG
mailing list" or even "post document to WG web page" approaches,
although it would be nice to have repositories available for
those who don't have ready access to places where documents can
be posted during IETF meetings.
The capability to upload new document revs (and sub-revs, when named
with an added dot and letter - e.g., ...-03.a.txt) is provided by
the prototype WG status and draft overview pages available under
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/ ...
Henrik
[...]
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