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Re: call for ideas: tail-heavy IETF process

2013-05-05 04:12:35
On 05/03/2013 03:59 PM, Thomas Narten wrote:
b) There is no interest to research where delay really happen.
I don't think that is true. Jari has pointed to his work. I think
there is actually quite a lot of understanding of where the delays
are. But fixing them is really really hard. Blaming the "tail end" or
"the IESG" for the problems has always been the easy target. The
reality (IMO) is that the place where improvements are needed is
within the WG and on having authors be more responsive. But history
suggests there are no easy fixes here.

The type of data I am looking for is different to what Jari provides.
I want to know what the real reasons are, which requires you to look at the individual documents and their history. Ultimately there are people working on these documents and each individual topic has it's own challenges contributing to delay, quality, etc.

Regarding your statement about the lower number of implementations it really depends what technology you look at. There are differences in terms of layers (with lower layer protocols you are less likely to see lots of implementations than with high layer protocols), and the dependencies a specific technology has (a feature that depends on 10 other things to be implemented and deployed will see fewer implementations).

An example: in JOSE and in OAuth you see a larger number of implementations already at an early stage of the document work. How many of those will then ultimately get updated to the published RFCs remains to be seen.