On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 02:55:56PM -0800, Bob Braden wrote:
Drafts. That always seemed counter-productive to me. I am not sure I
would characterize the problem as "serious", but it does seem t o warp
common sense for the sake of bureaucratic uniformity.)
I got some mail off-list about calling the problem "serious", too, so
I thought I should justify myself.
I had, in the past year, two different DNSEXT participants send me
frustrated email because of the idnits checks. The people in question
were both long-time contributors to the IETF with perhaps
ideosyncratic toolchains. Neither of them was using xml2rfc, and
neither of them had well-maintained *roff templates that just did the
right thing. My co-chair spent some time one day fiddling with the
draft of one of these people in order to make it pass the submission
checks for a -00 draft, mostly because the author was about to give up
in frustration.
Now, one might think that such people could be counselled to use
different tools, or to maintain their templates, or so on. But I
think that's completely wrong: the point here is to make it easy to
produce proto-specifications, and easy for the kinds of (possibly
cranky) technical contributors the IETF tends to attract. We're
supposed to be working on interoperability, and the formatting of the
documents ought therefore to be a contribution to that goal, not some
barrier that ensures only those using certain tools get to send in
their contributions.
Best regards,
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(_at_)shinkuro(_dot_)com
Shinkuro, Inc.
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