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Re: Call for review of proposed IESG Statement on Examples

2008-09-22 07:59:07
Spencer Dawkins skrev:
Hi, Magnus,

While not even dreaming of trying to speak for John, what I understood his point to be was that our process is, and needs to be, more than a set of rules.

You guys are going to get complaints (and you know that better than I do). But you're going to get complaints whether there is a perfectly-crafted IESG statement or not.

We've never recalled an AD, and we've never even had a public recall petition presented to the community. Please feel free to use your judgement, because the chances of that backfiring in any meaningful way are just about zero.

On this particular topic, I've been really dismayed that we've gotten so far into the weeds on what was obviously (to me) an attempt to do the right thing - provide example domain names - that is now morphing into a set of rules. You guys can keep tuning (and probably will keep tuning), but

- the principal justifications being advanced for why the problems you are solving are real, seem very bogus, and

- you are spending valuable AD time trying to perfect a set of rules, so you are trying to use your judgement now to avoid having to use your judgement in the future.

Specifications are hard. Corner cases make them harder. Don't write detailed specifications that you don't have to write. Asking authors to consider (!) using example domain names as part of last call comments, or AD review, is all that is required. Formally specifying when it is OK to use non-example domain names is overkill.

I not trying to find perfect rules or even guidelines. I trying to find something that is reasonably works and is understandable by the community. And this is not about non-example domain names. It is about the general case. I thought that I had managed to do a reasonable generalization of the statement to cover examples of all types that may cause issues. But I am apparently wrong. However, I don't know if it is a function of the discussion around SMTP that make everyone dive straight into email addresses and domain names.

But I do get the message make it even more general and don't have a lot of rules. Simply a statement about this and the need to consider it. Because I still have the feeling that if we don't publish any statement about examples then we will have a lot of complaints that; - the ID checklist can't contain think of statements because it is not a rule - as you haven't informed the community we will refuse to change text even if problematic.

I also note that when we don't document reasonably well it becomes impossible for others than the long timers to understand what should be thought of.


<rant>

The "but what if a domain name is published in an RFC and gets picked up by spammers?" concern wasn't even realistic in 2000. It's totally unrealistic now. I challenge you guys to name any domain name that started getting spam because it was published in an RFC (or Internet-Draft) after 2005, and received no spam before publication.

If this was a real problem we'd stop publishing author e-mail addresses in I-Ds and RFCs, and there's no chance we'll do that. So please take it as read that 99-point-something percent of e-mail is going to be spam anyway.

</rant>

I agree that it is a red herring from most perspectives. I think all of us that have a reasonably big foot-print on the Internet do receive spam in quite large volumes. I personally receive on the order of 50 spam per day to my work account which is very well published, while my private account gets 5 per month. This is the result from writing to IETF mail lists, having my address in drafts and RFCs. No question about it. And I would be kind of annoyed if anyone of you decided to publish one of my private addresses without my permission. That is why SPAM was listed as an example.

But as people are apparently get annoyed of this as an example of unwanted traffic I guess we should remove it because it isn't the most important.

Cheers

Magnus Westerlund

IETF Transport Area Director & TSVWG Chair
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