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Re: bettering open source involvement

2016-07-29 20:21:24
On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 11:44 PM, HANSEN, TONY L <tony(_at_)att(_dot_)com> 
wrote:
The fastest I’ve ever gotten an RFC out was 5 months from initial -00 draft
to RFC publication.



When it happened:



*) it was an individual contribution for a WG that was already in place

*) it was short, to the point and apropos to the WG

*) people in the WG were interested in it

*) it got reviewed in a single IETF WG meeting cycle, but remained an
individual contribution to the WG

*) the AD wasn’t swamped with other items

*) there was nothing controversial in it

Naming and service discovery, for example, are perpetually
controversial, and kind of need love and finality in a lot of areas.

This sank without a trace:

https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-taht-kelley-hunt-dhcpv4-to-slaac-naming-00.html

Speaking of APIs, there was an attempt at doing a name based socket
session layer,
about 3 years back, it's on github somewhere.



So RFCs CAN be done in a minimum amount of time.



                Tony



From: ietf <ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org> on behalf of Alia Atlas
<akatlas(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>
Date: Friday, July 29, 2016 at 9:04 AM



That certainly aligns with what I've heard as well, but can I poke into a
bit more.

I know that, for instance, I can get a draft from written to the RFC Editor
in 6 weeks,

if it isn't controversial.   Most of that time is to allow adequate review
at the WG, IETF

Last Call, directorates and IESG levels.



My sense is that the rest of the time goes to the WG process which has
aspects of:

   a) Getting people interested in the idea

   b) Having folks cycle in and out of paying attention and commenting

   c) Having authors/editors be distracted and unresponsive.

   d) Having WG Chairs be distracted/unresponsive and want more discussion
first.

   e) Avoiding having actively hard discussions about contentious points.

   f) (sometimes) waiting for implementations to sanity-check



It feels like a WG group or topic in a fixed area with agreement could get
past many of these slow-downs - if there were general agreement and a
culture in that WG of doing so.



We aren't, after all, doomed to repeat the delays of the past :-)  which
isn't to say that this would be easy.



What do you think?  Are there factors that I'm missing?   Is there a
technical topic where there could be enthusiasm to push?



Regards,

Alia





-- 
Dave Täht
Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
http://blog.cerowrt.org