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Re: Cross-area review (was Meeting rotation)

2015-12-22 11:02:07

Instead we should understand that we cannot and should not try to demand or 
expect documents that are perfect.  We should demand 'good enough' and let 
the outside world evaluate and feed the results back to us.

One view is that we already are in that mode. I don’t think any reasonable 
person could claim that any specification from a standards body of any sort is 
perfect, including from the IETF. More interestingly, the question is whether 
our community, directorate, and IESG reviews and associated practices reach the 
‘good enough’ level or under- or overshoot. But one person’s egregiously 
unnecessary fine-tuning is another person’s major threat to the Internet.

Personal opinion: we overdo it, a lot of the time.

But I think we are agreeing that we actually shoot for ‘good enough’ but do too 
little follow-up and revision. I could cite many counter examples where that 
follow-up does happen. But in many cases there is no follow-up. Why is that? 
Specification turned out to be uninteresting, so need to follow-up? Close 
enough, no business need to waste time to get to perfection? Remaining details 
hammered out in interops, code already runs, no need to revise? Aside from the 
few errata, no need for bigger changes? Worst specs are revised others are good 
enough? IETF process too complicated for the update? Probably a mixture of 
these reasons.

Jari

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