Donald Eastlake wrote:
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?
That is completely missing the point of the IETF consensus process.
If there is just one single person that objects during LC, but
raises 10 different issues, then it is totally irrelavant how many
there are that are in favour. Raised issues have to be processed with the
issue resolution process, i.e. drilldown (probably during discussion)
into pure matters of taste (where a significant majority decision is OK),
procedural issues (which strongly need to be resolved) and technical
issues that need to be either resolved or determined&declared to be
out-of-scope (or documented that no practical solution is known to
exists but the proposal/document is useful in spite of that).
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.
There is no problem with pointing to the resolution of previously
resolved issues in the WG issue tracker or WG / Document summary
for issued raised during IETF LC that aren't new -- provided that
the issue was actually resolved (rather than the objection withdrawn).
The number of documents produced in the IETF and looking for IESG
approval is huge, so we can only expect a small number of ADs to
have actually read the document and followed the discussion.
But in order to make the IESG decision process work _despite_ the
resource starvation, it is at least necessary for the responsible AD
to create a detailed IESG write-up of the Last Call listing all
issues that were raised including URLs or other suitable references
_to_the_original_messages_ that raised significant or controversial
issues and significant messages of the followup discussion,
for there to be a resource-conservative independent judgement
on the _original_ issues, the _original_ discussion and the proposed
resolution by the responsible AD, document sheperd and document
author/editor.
Yes, I know that this is currently not easy for the one doing
the write-up. Maybe this could be simplified by the IETF Mailing
List exploder to _first_ put a message in the mailing list archive,
obtain a URL into the archive for it and then send out the message
_with_ that URL of the archived message out to the mailing list recipients.
-Martin
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