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Re: [v6ops] Last Call:

2011-06-09 16:32:11
Gert Doering wrote:

On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 11:05:29AM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
The best way to not rat-hole is just to drop the proposed action.  

One voice doesn't make it "consensus to drop".

In the IETF, that is supposed to be possible.

A single technical or procedural issue that is raised before or
during Last Call and not resolved precludes  IETF rough consensus.

intention behind this include (using words from rfc2418):
   good working group consensus about a bad design.

While the Tao (rfc-4677) is only informational, it seems to capture
the IETF spirit quite good:

   "We reject kings, presidents and voting.
   We believe in rough consensus and running code".

   The lack of formal voting has caused some very long delays for some
   proposals, but most IETF participants who have witnessed rough
   consensus after acrimonious debates feel that the delays often result
   in better protocols.  (And, if you think about it, how could you have
   "voting" in a group that anyone can join, and when it's impossible to
   count the participants?)  Rough consensus has been defined in many
   ways; a simple version is that it means that strongly held objections
   must be debated until most people are satisfied that these objections
   are wrong.

or look at rfc-4858, later parts of section 3.2, another Informational
but valuable document.

e.g. if an implementor raises an issue, one should carefully listen
and talk about it, even if it is just one single implementor.
The opposite, an implementor that does not see a problem is not
proof of anything (as we can see from regular interop problems
showing up only during interop tests).  Reading specs correctly
(and carefully) seems to be less common than is desirable.


The purpose of the discussion is to seperate issues of taste (where
significant majority decisions are OK) from technical&procedural
issues and resolving all of the latter categorie(s) or determining
technical issues to be out-of-scope.


WG chairs and ADs have a significant discretion, and I've seen it
happening that they got too personally involved, inducing a non-marginal
bias on the issue resolution process in situations where this was
unnecessary and not appropriate.  That may or may not result in
worse decision.  But it is conceived as unfair by those holding
the objections and a problem by itself because it regularly
taints other discussions on other work items.


-Martin
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