-------- Original Message --------
I read Dave's words "clear statement of what actions must be taken to clear
the Discuss" not as requiring the specification of a complete fix, but
rather as an indication of what needs to happen to the draft.
Implementation details of meeting those requirements are left to the WG.
I don't know what Dave meant by his words, but I can say that similar
words were being used when I was on IESG, and at that time they was
taken to mean a bit more than you assume Dave meant. It wasn't enough
to say what was wrong with a draft, the AD was expected to tell the WG
what to do. The expectation was often that the AD should supply
specific text for minor changes to a document that would allow the AD to
clear his discuss. This further implied that any problems that could
not be fixed with small textual changes had to remain in the draft - the
AD wasn't able to say, e.g. "the entire approach has serious and
irreparable technical flaws", or "the protocol appears to be sound but
the document is so poorly written that small changes will not save it" -
even though one or the other were occasionally the case. And this
further led to ADs insisting on small textual changes that had no real
effect on the document - mostly to make the ADs feel better for having
to approve such poor documents.
Of course, such flaws should have been caught a long time before Last
Call. That's one of the big problems with our process - we don't have
good mechanisms for catching those problems, particularly when they
cross area boundaries. We leave it to the supervising AD to implement
any ad hoc mechanisms they choose, but the WGs are able to push back on
those because there's no community consensus behind them.
Keith
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