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Re: Help with tools/process to review a draft

2015-04-08 07:22:42
Just to follow up here ...

On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 10:19 PM, Mukom Akong T. 
<mukom(_dot_)tamon(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>
wrote:

Thank you all for your valuable help and guidance.

On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 4:36 AM, Randy Bush <randy(_at_)psg(_dot_)com> wrote:

I volunteered to review a draft during the last meeting in Dallas. As
this is my first time, I'd like to get any advice about the most
effective way to do this:


Thank you for volunteering!


focus on the technology, it's correctness, and how well and clearly it
is described.  forget the processes, use whatever tools suit you, the
datatracker will keep track of diffs as the author(s) hack, and you can
report your review via email.


I'm assuming that you're volunteering to review a draft within a working
group.  If you're asking about something else, my answer might be different
(for example, if you are reviewing for one of the review teams, many of
them have specific lists of things to look for and prefer that reviews be
structured in specific ways and sent to specific places.

If you can use plain text email, that works best.

What you find will have an impact on what you do with what you find.

Many reviewers use a "major issues", "minor issues", "editorial issues"
organization.

As Randy says - focus on technical correctness, and on whether someone who
isn't currently active in the working group can tell what to do. If you do
those two things, you have done well.

Anyone CAN review for editorial issues, but if you're seeing major issues,
please focus on those.

If the approach in the draft just does not work, you can say that, but if
you're not sure whether there's a problem, you can ask questions. ADs do
that all the time, for better or worse.

If you find several major issues, you may want to split your review into
multiple e-mails, to help the working group focus on each issue without
having to wade through over-quoted text that's not actually being discussed
at this point in the e-mail thread.

Any draft that the working group sends for publication will have an
assigned RFC Editor, so if you see editorial mistakes that make the draft
unclear, please report those, but you don't have to spell-check, verify
comma usage, etc.

For a working group draft that hasn't been publication-requested, it's best
to send reviews to the working group mailing list.

If you are only reporting editorial nits, you can send those to the
editor(s).


I'm probably over-thinking this

you are.  but doing so seems to be a vital skill in the ietf :)


Ideally, not all Nomcoms select for that ...

Spencer