On 05/17/2013 05:31 AM, Yoav Nir wrote:
On May 17, 2013, at 12:58 AM, Keith Moore
<moore(_at_)network-heretics(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 05/16/2013 04:46 PM, Yoav Nir wrote:
The time for asking whether the group has considered making this field fixed
length instead of variable, or whether RFC 2119 language is used in an
appropriate way, or whether the protocol is extensible enough is at IETF last
call.
Actually the time for asking these questions is long before IETF-wide Last
Call. We need widespread review of proposals for standards-track documents
long before a WG thinks it's finished with those documents. It's a gaping
hole in our process.
Sure. But we have opinionated ADs who read every draft that comes to the IESG.
There is no way they have time to participate in all of the working groups. I,
as a participant, can read drafts as they are discussed in working groups,
because I'm free to ignore all the drafts that are not interesting to me. ADs
don't have that luxury.
Unless things have changed a great deal since I was on IESG, ADs do have
the luxury of not reading drafts. When I was an AD I tried to read
every draft that was in my area (Applications), and every draft that
seemed to have the ability to affect applications developers. The
lower in the protocol stack, the less likely that I'd feel like I'd have
anything useful to say about a draft. Even when I "read" a draft
outside of my area, in many cases it was just skimming the draft looking
for red flags. I developed a pretty good sense of whether a group had
done due diligence or whether there were serious technical omissions
that they were trying to ignore. Only in the latter (rare) cases did I
feel like such drafts needed more of my attention.
I certainly agree that ADs don't have time to participate in all working
groups, or even probably 10% of our working groups. But WGs should be
able to periodically summarize what they're doing - what problem they're
trying to solve, what approach they're taking, what technologies they're
using, what major decisions they've made, what the current sticking
points seem to be, what problems are as yet unresolved, what potential
for cross-group and cross-area effects have been identified, and what
efforts have been made to get the affected parties in the loop. For
most groups that summary should be maybe 2-3 pages. The ADs should be
able to verify that those summaries are accurate and reasonably
complete, or appoint a trusted WG observer other than the chair to
review each summary. ADs and other members of the community should be
able to view those summaries and comment on their accuracy. And I
think it would be reasonable for everyone on IESG to read through those
summaries once in awhile - at least for groups that seemed likely to
affect their areas of concern. I think that such summaries could
actually lessen IESG's workload.
Fix that problem, and most of the conflicts between IESG and WGs that surround
DISCUSS votes will go away.
Good reviewers are a scarce resource, and there are 500(*) working group drafts
competing for their attention. That's a hard problem to fix.
That's a related but IMO somewhat different problem. Working groups
are producing far too many documents. That's one reason (far from the
only one) why WGs shouldn't undertake documents that aren't specifically
authorized in their charters.
Keith