On Jun 24, 2011, at 10:46 AM, Donald Eastlake wrote:
An IETF consensus call is judgement as to rough consensus. There is no
mechanical set of rules that can substitute for judgement.
WG Chairs judge the consensus of the Working Group. It is reasonable
for them to take into account discussions at WG meetings as well as WG
mailing list discussions.
The IESG judges the consensus of the IETF. It is reasonable for them
to take into account discussions on the WG mailing list and on any
area mailing list or the like, as well as on the IETF mailing list and
discussions at WG, area, and IETF plenary meetings.
I think I mostly disagree with this, for reasons stated earlier.
Now it might be that, for some specific issue or objection raised during IETF
LC to some technical proposal, the IESG could look at the WG record and say
"This issue was thoroughly considered by the WG. There's really no way to
solve this problem that will satisfy all concerns, and the WG did as good a job
at making an appropriate compromise as could be expected." That could be an
appropriate way to respond to a dispute over a technical compromise design
choice. And in general, I think IESG should give preference to a WG's
technical decisions if it's clear that the WG made an effort to understand all
of the competing concerns and to strike an appropriate balance between them.
I don't think that rationale would apply in the case of 6to4-historic, as
there's really no technical need to declare this historic. And the
6to4-advisory document does a much better job at both recommending remedies to
the problems that people have (reasonably) complained about, and striking a
balance between competing concerns.
If polls at area meetings with 100+ people at them at three successive
IETF meetings on different continents consistently show, say, a 3 to 1
preference for some proposal but the IETF Last call email has 6 people
speaking against and only 4 in favor, what do you think the right
judgement would be as to the consensus of the IETF community? Of
course, I'm not saying that's what happened hear. But a narrow rules
that the IESG is required to put on blinders and only consider the
IETF discussion list IETF Last Call email, ignoring previous
discussions on other relevant IETF mailing lists and ignoring WG,
area, and IETF plenary meeting discussions they have attended, is just
arbitrary nonsense.
I wouldn't agree with that kind of narrow rule either. But when evaluating
IETF-wide consensus, it doesn't make sense to just add up all of the yeas and
nays in both IETF and WG last call.
And in any case where there's not a clear consensus, part of the question
should probably be "is there a compelling need for this document or action to
move forward at this time?" Sometimes I think people get the idea that they
have to approve things "to get them off of their plates" so to speak, and to
avoid having to iterate over the document several more times.
Keith
p.s. My belief is that the 6to4-historic document wouldn't be nearly as
divisive if either (a) it were deferred for a year or three or (b) the
proponents had been willing to compromise on the status label. When simple
changes would suffice to build wide consensus, you have to wonder why there's
been so much effort to push through a document for which consensus is dubious
at best.
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