Hi Henning and Lucy,
First thanks, Lucy, for the ack on the wg tools :-)
More inline:
On 2005-06-15 11:05 Henning Schulzrinne said the following:
Lucy E. Lynch wrote:
Excuse top posting, please.
Many of the issues related to WG progress can be managed using the
excellent web tools provided at tools.ietf.org - see for example:
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/ccamp/
This site makes review quick and easy. Clicking on a draft title
gets you not just txt but a nits check and diffs from any previous
versions. See: draft-ietf-ccamp-gmpls-ason-lexicography-02.txt
The top menu includes links to email the WG Chair(s) and:
Drafts | Agendas | Minutes | Charter | List Archive
making it easy to review the Charter, check the list archive for
comments on a given draft, and review minutes etc.
These tools are useful, but don't track (for example) working group last
calls. They don't even track interim meetings, at least based on my
limited checks.
True on both counts. I have code in place to track WG last calls, but
haven't had resources to handle the mails from all mailing list so far.
Possibly I'll have that in place before IETF-63.
Finding list comments by draft in a mailing list works fine when a
working group focuses on one main spec, but there are many working
groups that progress literally dozens of specs at the same time. Just
take a look at the active I-D list for SIPPING and AVT, to cite two
groups I'm familiar with. In some cases, subject headers contain the
draft title - in most cases, they don't and they may use such helpful
subject headings like "Last call comments" or "IETF 62 discussion".
(Besides the problem that a search facility for the mailing list
archives is non-existent. Not a problem for a small mailing list, but
try flipping through the WG list which generates hundreds of messages a
month and has been active for five years plus...)
Agreed. I'll see if I can arrange a way to Google search individual
mailing lists, by more or less devious means. Stay tuned.
There is also a link to a Draft dependency graph at the top of the drafts
page. The graph shows you where cross area review might help a draft
progress, as well as highlighting blocking drafts, expired work, etc.
If every WG had and used such a page to triage work based on blocks and
cross-area dependencies things might move faster. Authors (and WG
reviewers) can also use the nits/diffs/and list archives to make sure that
individual documents are in shape to move forward.
I'm sorry to say that for the drafts that took years to progress, 'nits'
problems were not exactly the reason. I wish it was that easy to fix.
Getting people to use the tools is a seperate issue. Just another mash
note from a tools.ietf.org fan...
These are all useful tools and I commend whoever is working on them.
They are just not quite up to the task to address the problems I
mentioned, in my opinion.
Again, agreed. I've been thinking for a month or so about adding colour-
coding for the drafts, but in a slightly different way to begin with:
The submission dates for each draft are the fixed dates we have available
to work with currently, so I thought I'd simply arrange to have a time-
line for each draft, with the interval between each new version submission
colour-coded starting with green, with a gradient into yellow, orange and
red as a function of the time since the last update.
I'd like to change that to a colour indication related to schedule dates
in the charters when machine-readable dates are available for e.g. the
three milestone dates for a draft suggested by Spencer: "WG draft adopted,
publication requested, approved for publication".
Regards,
Henrik
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