Melinda Shore wrote:
On 6/13/15 12:22 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 14/06/2015 01:19, John C Klensin wrote:
... However, if a WG is
started with a "solution" and a group of people behind it, there are
some bad effects:
Yes, and this is certainly a very real situation. I've personally
experienced it in the past, and am currently experiencing it (without
belligerence, fortunately).
I'm actually pretty ambivalent about this one. I'd much rather see things
coming in that are relatively well-baked than see proposals that are just
problem descriptions.
It seems to me to be a more productive use of energy to negotiate
engineering differences than it is go try to figure out whether or not a given
problem statement reflects an actual problem that somebody is really
experiencing, or if there's the ability to come up with a useful solution.
Yes, it can be heated and horrible (and I actually left the IETF for several
years in part because of my experience along these lines in one particular
working group), but I think we're better off figuring out how to deal with
these situations than we are going with the problem statement/ use
case/gap analysis model, which is really beginning to annoy me as
unproductive, slow, and unmoored to much that's useful.
If a research team brings in a prototype and 'throws it over the wall' to le
the WG refine it, I agree. All too often though a product team brings in a
beta, and expects a rubber stamp of their soon to ship product. Those are the
times that get heated, because changing the 'requirements' means slowing down
the release.
I understand that many people hate the requirements/problem-statement/use-case
documents, but without those the spec has no goals. Granted people driving a
given solution will have a set in their head, but if you really expect
consensus, and particularly if you expect the wider IETF to understand the
context, it has to be documented and agreed on by the WG. Contention rooted in
a difference of opinion about the requirements / use-cases can be dealt with by
letting each faction solve their favorite subset. Saying 'there can be only one
true way' will force heated discussions.
Tony
Melinda