On Aug 30, 2011, at 5:51 PM, Fred Baker wrote:
On Aug 30, 2011, at 2:17 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
My understanding was always that DISCUSS was supposed to be an indication
that, at a minimum, the AD needs to understand the situation better before
casting a yea or nay vote. The resolution of a DISCUSS might end up being
a yes vote, a no objection vote, a request for clarification of the
document. It should also be possible for an AD to say "now that I've
understood better, I can't support this going forward" (for which ABSTAIN
is not an appropriate label).
It should never be wrong for an AD to vote DISCUSS, though it's reasonable
to limit the amount of time during which a DISCUSS can stand for a
particular document.
It should also never be wrong for an AD to vote NO if the AD has initially
voted DISCUSS, made a sincere effort to understand the issues, believes that
he does so, and can state 2026 or other documented criteria for why the
document is not suitable for approval.
I agree in part. My problem is that even some ADs tell me that ADs sometimes
behave as if they haven't done their job if they haven't produced a
"discuss". A few months ago, I got a "discuss" on a document that in essence
said "what should I be writing a 'discuss' about?". I have no problem with
valid concerns, and many of the concerns raised are valid. It should be
possible for a working group to produce a quality document and have the IESG
simply approve it, however. I'm not sure it is.
The first time I reviewed a document as an AD, I realized I was working very
hard to find something wrong. And I did - I found a bona fide (and
uncontroversial) technical flaw - actually an incorrect value for a constant.
But after that I got over needing to find things that were wrong. I found
plenty of issues without trying to do anything more than read and understand
the documents - and had quite enough work to do just reading and understanding
them and writing up those issues without making more work for myself.
(Especially when other ADs would often demand that I not only identify the
issues but also specify the fixes - something I always regarded as out-of-scope
for an AD and even potentially "tampering" with WG output.)
So I don't disagree that ADs sometime believe that they need to vote Discuss or
they're not doing their jobs. Though I have a hard time believing that the
drafts coming out of WGs these days are so good that ADs have to work hard to
find things that are wrong with many of them. If they're trying to find a
reason to Discuss every document, well I guess that is a problem. But
overall, it seems like there are far more incentives to avoid finding reasons
to object to a document, than there are to find them.
Discuss votes should time out and be replaced by Abstain (if not explicitly
changed by the AD) after say 45 days.
There I disagree. If the AD raised a valid issue, the ball is in the
author/wg's court to address it. They can game this rule by not responding
until after 45 days.
I don't think I stated that rule very well. If the author/wg fail to address
the issue within 45 days, the AD should of course be able to change the vote to
No. The point is that the Discuss should inherently be a temporary state, a
time during which the AD doesn't vote No (yet) but lets the author/WG know that
he has issues with a document. And the idea is to encourage those parties
enough time to understand each other and work out their differences before
bringing the issue to a firm vote. But I don't think that the WG should be
able to game the rule to force the AD's objection to go away, nor should the AD
be able to singlehandedly block a document.
Personally, I would rather see the document returned to the author/wg if
review results in a request for major changes. In my working group, we
recently had one draft completely rewritten in the response to "discuss"es,
and I pulled it back for the WG to decide whether it still had consensus
around the resulting draft. I would say the same about a "discuss" that is
not adequately responded to in 45 days; the IESG should clean it off their
plate.
IMO, any time a document is significantly revised, IESG should consider it a
separate item, requiring a new Last Call, writeup, ballot, etc.
What's also not fair game is to "raise the bar" - to expect the document at
DS to meet more stringent criteria than it was required to meet at the time
of PS approval.
Hmmm, the "demonstrated interoperability" requirement of DS/IS is in fact a
raising of the bar,and one that has served us well. We don't (although IMHO
we should) require even an implementation to go to PS.
I should have been more specific. By "raising the bar" I was thinking about
things like design decisions, and document quality. If feature FOO was judged
to be of adequate design at PS, it's not fair to say it's not adequate on DS
review unless there's some new information that demonstrates that it doesn't
work well. Or if the wording of a document was okay with IESG at PS, it's not
fair for an AD to nitpick that wording at DS review time unless there's some
reason to believe that the wording caused problems. For those cases the AD can
always file an erratum.
Keith
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf