Comments in line...
- Ralph
On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 18:28 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
The case John outlines is the one I am concerned about as well.
[...]
And, FWIW, when the AD suggests specific text changes, it's often
enough the desire of that AD rather than based on feedback from some
other WG.
I don't see anything wrong with that. It's the ADs' job to push back
on documents with technical flaws. They're supposed to use their
judgments as technical experts, not just be conduits of information
supplied by others.
I disagree that the ADs are necessarily that much more technically
astute than the rest of us. I would actually feel more comfortable with
ADs providing their technical judgment with the rest of us, through the
same mechanism: WG or IETF last call. And that technical judgment
should be expressed openly, in an archived WG mailing list, where
everyone's technical input can be reviewed and everyone who provides
technical input can be held accountable.
If whoever wants to provide technical input to make a significant change
in a specification, be it an AD or a WG chair or ..., can't make a
sufficiently convincing case, in an open WG mailing list, that there at
least might not be "rough consensus" for a specification, then I would
say the specification doesn't need the change.
I think the ADs should continue to be able to raise such issues, but
I also think it might be helpful to have better way of resolving such
disputes than either "let the AD win" or "let's sit on this until the
IESG holds its nose and passes it".
Sure - and sometimes other ADs get involved, and it boils down to
"what can you add/change to appease the other AD" rather than "what is
sensible to add".
It's as likely to boil down to "how do we get this WG to realize that
there really is a serious technical problem with what they've created?"
From a process viewpoint the two cases (one where a clueless AD is
pushing back against a clueful WG, and another where a clueless WG is
being pushed back on by a clueful AD) are equivalent, and it's
difficult to change the process in a way that solves one of those
problems without making the other one worse.
OK, so if the AD or the external reviewer or whoever needs to push back,
let's do it in the open, on a mailing list, during a last call...
(and yes, both of these are extreme (though not rare) cases - it can
also be a conflict between different kinds of cluefulness, where there
are legitimate concerns on both sides and it's hard for any individual
to see enough of the picture on short notice to understand what kind of
compromise would be reasonable.)
Keith
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