Dave, we are shouting past each other so I will not repeat myself
on all points. However,
...
Of course, there can be cases where that is not so - in fact, that's
the main reason that the IESG defined the DISCUSS criteria a few years
ago.
Have you seen a pattern of having a Discuss cite the criterion that
justifies it? I haven't. It might be interesting to attempt an audit
of Discusses, against the criteria...
It might, and at the time when the IESG had a large backlog of unresolved
DISCUSSes and the current criteria were being developed (I'm talking
about 2005/2006), the IESG did indeed end up looking at all the old
DISCUSSes against the criteria, and held dedicated conference calls
to talk through many of those DISCUSSes and in many cases persuade the AD
concerned to drop them, or rewrite them in an actionable format. In my
recollection, Allison Mankin was the leader of the charge on this.
But these are all judgment calls, so I don't think there can be an
objective audit. There could be an audit of how many DISCUSSes take
more than N months to clear, or something like that. There were tools
around for that some years ago, but I don't know if they exist for the
modern version of the tracker.
It well might be true that omitting the AD reviews would increase the
number. By how much? To what effect?
Hard to tell. But it would amount to giving the IESG secretary a large
rubber stamp *unless* the final responsibility was explicitly moved
elsewhere.
Herein lies the real problem: As with many process and structure
discussions in the IETF, folk often see only a simplistic, binary choice
between whatever they prefer, versus something akin to chaos.
The world is more nuanced than that, and the choices more rich.
Here is a small counter-example to your sole alternatives of status quo
or rubber stamp:
Imagine a process which requires a range of reviews and requires
ADs to take note of the reviews and the community support-vs-objection.
Imagine that the job of the ADs is to assess these and to block
proposals that have had major, unresolved problems uncovered or that
lack support, and to approve ones that have support and lack known,
major deficiencies as documented by the reviews.
The only difference between that and what I see happening today is that
the ADs actually verify the reviews by looking at the drafts themselves.
And why do they do that? Because they aren't going to take the
responsibility for approving a document that they haven't read. Nobody
would, I hope.
Brian
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