Lakshminath:
It's a fair thing to say that the ADs need to see a response. I
also agree that cross-area review is important and at times unearths
issues that may not have been raised in WG-level
reviews. Personally, I prefer cross-area reviews to take place
prior to the LC process and hope that the the LC process is for
those issues that may have been really overlooked despite the best
efforts of the WG chairs and ADs.
I do not however quite understand the idea that we have to get
consensus in the context of each GenART/Sec-dir/<fill-in-the-blank>
review. It is of course quite plausible that one or two of those
reviewers will never be satisfied with any level of revision of a
given specification. In other cases, it may be that the reviewer
has his or her personal preference on how to write documents and
will never come out and say that the document they reviewed is "ready."
I think you completely misunderstand my point. A reviewer can make a
comment, and the authors or WG can say that they disagree. This is
important for an AD to see. The AD now needs to figure out whether
the reviewer is in the rough part of the rough consensus or whether
the reviewer is representative of a larger part of the community. If
the review is ignored, then the AD get no indication that further
investigation is needed.
I have winced when some authors wrote to me after a review saying
something along the lines of "does the following revised text sound
better." I would have been merely pointing out something I thought
was not clear or might cause interoperability issues that they may
have overlooked or missed. How they might fix it is entirely up to
them (or the ADs involved). If their take was that they considered
the comment and thought what they wrote is much more meaningful in
the context of their work or the interoperability issue I raised
does not apply within the scope of their specification, well so be
it. Next, I trust them to do that. I don't need to see a
dialog. I am willing to clarify my comments, and if I cannot
articulate the issues I am raising clearly, well then the document
needs to move on in the process.
In the example you give, I think the response is good as it ensures
that the comment was understood.
Either the shepherding AD or the AD who solicited the review needs
to determine what if anything specific needs to be done in all these
cases. They are the judges of consensus. No matter who the
reviewer might be they were not selected by the community to do the AD's job.
True. As you have heard from Tim and me, these reviews are very
helpful to the ADs, and I am saying that the discussion that follows
such a review is helpful in judging consensus.
Creating an environment where all these additional reviews and
reviewers essentially block document progress is not the right direction.
I agree, and requiring a response to the review is substantially
different than blocking a document. The alternative is silence, and
silence cannot aid in judging consensus.
Russ
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