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Re: IANA Considerations

2005-06-09 12:22:41
In message <01LP9982FXHW00004T(_at_)mauve(_dot_)mrochek(_dot_)com>, Ned Freed 
writes:
From where I sat, the problem was trying to ensure that a WG thought
about an issue.  Neither mandatory material nor checkoff boxes
accomplish that, but I think the former is often more useful because
material in an I-D is visible to the entire WG.

I disagree completely and think you have this exactly backwards. Mandatory
material would only help if people actually think about what goes in it - whic
h
they don't. Rather, they think about it as "another something we have to do to
get past the IESG" and deal with it by spending as little time on it as
possible.

Sure -- I saw a lot of that when I was on the IESG.  Too often, I would 
say "in your Security Considerations section, you need to think about 
X, Y, and Z" -- and I'd get back a new document saying "think about X, 
Y, and Z".

Even worse, the presence of a section that says "these are all the IANA
considerations" or "there are no IANA considerations here" is likely to cause
reviewers to assume that someone has already checked for IANA actions. This
will lead to more omissions, not less.

And in fact there has already been at least one example of this happening. The
document draft-ietf-lemonade-mms-mapping-04.txt is now in the RFC Editor's
queue. It's IANA considerations section says "no IANA actions". Alas, the
document defines any number of new header fields that need to be placed in the
appropriate header regsitry.

That IANA considerations section sure helped a lot, didn't it?

You can lead a horse to water....

I agree -- there are no panaceas here.  It's a question of what will 
help the most, not what will solve the problem.

Like it or not, careful reviews and review checklists, while quited flawed in
their own right, are the best tool we have. When I was on the IESG I had my own
private review checklist; it was the only thing I found that worked.

Such reviews are certainly necessary.  The question is this: what 
policy is most likely to reduce the incidence of such things?  We'll 
never eliminate it.

                --Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb



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