--On Friday, February 21, 2014 08:59 +0100 Brian Trammell
<ietf(_at_)trammell(_dot_)ch> wrote:
As long as (1) we have tools to map authors to documents for
search and aggregation purposes anyway, (2) we maintain the
reserved structure of draft-ietf-wg-* and other special second
elements, I don't see any reason to further restrict the
second element of the draft name.
This came in handy recently in IPPM, where we had multiple
proposals for a performance metrics registry that started
pretty widely separated from each other. It would have been
arbitrary and inaccurate simply to choose an author name for
each the (individual draft) stages of the convergence; the
resulting draft-manyfolks-ippm-metric-registry-00 is IMO
accurately named.
A policy strictly restricting element 2 to author names would
have required us to waste energy on a "what do we want to name
the band" discussion.
Brian,
I think this discussion will reach the point of diminishing
returns rather quickly, but I note that:
- IPPM, or any other WG, has very little control over what an
I-D is called until it is accepted as a draft. Until then, it
is formally an individual piece of work. So "what do we want to
name the band" ought to be off-topic unless you want to provide
guidance as to what the draft will be called if the WG adopts
it... and then you get to mess only with what will come after
draft-ietf-WGNAME-
- No matter how many authors, collaborations, etc.., are
involved in a particular draft, someone has to push the "submit"
button (or send mail to the Secretariat) on the -00 version.
That individual is a pretty good approximation to "first author"
whether he or she is listed first in the header or not. Note
that, that person is not listed in the headers and "author
addresses" section as an author, the document is headed for
manual submission anyway.
- The problem with "draft-manyfolks-" is that it is likely to
have an entirely different meaning in some other WG in some
other area than it does in IPPM than it does in IPPM. Contrast
that with, e.g., some longstanding semi-organizations whose
membership is either constant or fairly well-defined (even if
nominally anonymous) such as draft-ymbk-... Compared with
"draft-manyfolks-... draft-ABCDEF-..., where "ABCDEF" are the
first letters of the names of the major contributors, or
something similar. Even if that is unique, I don't think that
(or draft-manyfolks-...) are helpful because, outside the WG,
they communicate no more useful information than
draft-anonymous-..., YMMD. Of course, you could see if the
powers that be would be happy with "draft-IPPM-manyfolks..."
but, if you have gotten that far, why not just make it a WG
draft and be done with it?
best,
john