John C Klensin wrote:
If an AD who was responsible for a WG came up with an issue about that
WG's work and raised it only during or after Last Call, I'd expect
either a really good explanation or a resignation. I certainly would
not expect it to happen often. But, IMO, we have an IESG and, indeed,
an IETF rather than a collection of different organizations addressing
per-area issues precisely to increase the odds of catching serious
cross-area and cross-perspective issues before things go out. Like it
or not, unless the relevant WG makes an effort to get broad reviews at
critical "early" points, there will always be a risk of late surprises
as someone --in the community during Last Call or on the IESG--
suddenly wakes up and says "but how does this relate to XYZ".
I was obviously not clear enough on my first post because I wasn't referring
to the shepherding AD or the poor AD's who have paid no attention at all
who are then tapped to do their job. It's really the in between AD's that I
think really exasperate the wg participants -- if they've paid enough
attention
to attend the wg meetings and perhaps even subscribe to the mailing list and
registered concerns, I really think they owe it to the working group to
either
get them out when the working group is in active issue resolving mode, or
to... well, just live with it. Or something. Frankly it does a lot of
damage to
the IESG's reputation when you know that there's likely going to be
trouble,
but there is nothing you can do to fend it off ahead of time because those
AD's have only given vague allusions to their non-amusement. It promotes
the vision of the unitary IESG which I think is a bad thing.
With regard to textual nit-picking and evaluation of worthiness of
prose, I tend to agree with what I think you are saying. However, if a
document is too badly written to permit interoperable implementations
to be constructed without clarifying conversations among implementers,
authors, and/or the WG, then the document is a failure and needs
pushback. As with late surprises, somewhat more proactive effort on
the part of WGs could prevent many of the problems we see, but...
I was using "wordsmithing" rather broadly. My probably idiosyncratic meaning
of "wordsmithing" here was "will this DISCUSS change the mechanics of the
protocol or not". If the answer is no, we're really just making the document
more ready for publication IMO. Something that does bring that possibility
is obviously a lot more serious. It's been my admittedly limited
experience that
my version of "wordsmithing" is a lot more common, and the source of a lot
of delay to varying degrees of dubiousness.
Mike
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