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Re: Purpose of IESG Review

2013-04-12 10:26:38
Brian E Carpenter wrote:

Seeing randomly selected drafts as a Gen-ART reviewer, I can
say that serious defects quite often survive WG review and
sometimes survive IETF Last Call review, so the final review
by the IESG does serve a purpose.

I'm currently seeing a document with some serious defects in
IETF Last Call (rfc2560bis) and an apparent desire to have
it Rubberstamped by the IESG (recycling at Proposed Standard).

While that seems procedurally permitted for the IESG to do such
rubberstamping (aka "waive") for a proposed standard
(rfc2026, last paragraph on page 12):

   http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2026#page-12

   A Proposed Standard should have no known technical omissions with
   respect to the requirements placed upon it.  However, the IESG may
   waive this requirement in order to allow a specification to advance
   to the Proposed Standard state when it is considered to be useful and
   necessary (and timely) even with known technical omissions.

one should really consider the consequences of such a decision,
especially for -bis and -ter documents.

The original draft (and now full) standard requires that such defects
are removed _before_ the document is advanced.  So when "waiving" known
defects/omissions (in particular obvious and formally provable ones),
this means that there will have to be a ter document produced where
this defects are fixed and this document be recycled at Proposed
one more time before the standard can progress on the maturity level.

It turns out that for a non-negligible amount of the defects there
is a constituency that want the defect to be retained rather than
fixed, and they expect the IESG to waive defects on -bis, -ter etc.
documents whenever it was previously accepted for Proposed with
that defect.



IMHO, if the IESG members sticks to their own criteria at
http://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/discuss-criteria.html,
i.e. do not DISCUSS a document for spurious reasons, they
are doing just fine. If they don't stick to those criteria,
complaint is justified.

Of course this will always be a matter of judgment.

Regards
   Brian

On 11/04/2013 18:54, Joe Touch wrote:

My concern is that by conflating their IESG position with their personal
review, the document process is inappropriately delayed and that
documents are modified to appease a small community that does not
justify its position as representative.

What do you want to see the IESG do instead?

Simply Rubberstamp WG consensus?  That would turn the whole IESG
diversity discussion into an absurd waste of time...

-Martin

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