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RE: I-D Working groups and mailing list

2011-08-07 11:19:34


--On Thursday, August 04, 2011 10:38 -0700 "Murray S. Kucherawy"
<msk(_at_)cloudmark(_dot_)com> wrote:

...
I don't know if there is a need for "template" changes or
some formal section in the write up, but it would seem to me
that an author who has reached a level of getting WG assigned
...
OK, now I *really* don't know what the proposal is.

If we're not creating something formal, then the
rules/procedures we have in place now are sufficient.  Those
are:

If a WG has been created and "owns" the document, then the
document has the WG name in its filename and usually says the
name of the working group at the top of the first page.

If it's an individual submission associated with a working
group, it has the first of those two.

If it's an individual submission not tracking a working group,
the work may or may not benefit from some explicit
association, and none is required.

In any case, I'm now quite confused about what change is being
proposed here.

Murray,

While I agree this has exploded out of control and into the
weeds, I think there is one fundamental issue.  That is whether
someone can easily find the right mailing list on which to
discuss a posted draft.  Modulo distractions, the responses
seem, in my highly prejudiced view, to fall into the following
categories:

(1) We should modify the posting tools and instructions to the
Secretariat so that no I-D can be posted unless a mailing list
reference appears (and probably appears in a designated format
and place).

(2) For WG-ish documents, it is easy enough to figure out where
the discussion forum is, at least if you have a clue.  The
advocates for (1) point out that clues are not universally
distributed.

(3) Especially for non-WG documents, some of us are fearful of a
requirement to designate a discussion forum as a prerequisite
for posting a document, especially since some documents are
posted in order to initiate a discussion of forum.  In
principle, all such documents could be pointed to the IETF list.
That is not necessarily an optimal solution even though it would
likely be the effect of requiring an announcement as in (1).

(4) Others (probably a partially overlapping group with (3))
just find more rules and requirements for more boilerplate
undesirable.  They would (at least mostly) be happy if lots of
off-list notes went to authors of I-Ds for which the discussion
forum wasn't clear, asking them about the discussion forum and
recommending that it be included in the next draft.   That might
actually encourage discussion and would be as, or more,
effective at retraining authors than more rules.

   john

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