Actually there was plenty of back and forth on normative language when I
was on the IESG, and a lot of it had to do with the issues that Barry is
addressing in this document, particularly the uppercase/lowercase stuff.
And there was a lot of confusion on the part of draft authors, because the
IESG wasn't being particularly consistent about it. (E.g., I really hate
it when people use tortured english to avoid saying lower-case should or
lower-case must, and a few other ADs at the time shared this view, but not
everyone did.)
A lot of the time wasted is wasted when people get it wrong and there's a
big discussion. If you tend to get it right, you wouldn't have seen this.
On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 2:03 PM, Melinda Shore
<melinda(_dot_)shore(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>
wrote:
On 8/10/16 9:33 AM, Ted Lemon wrote:
Repeat discussions waste time.
Not much, I don't think. I certainly cannot think of
an instance where a document has been anything other than
trivially delayed by a discussion about normative language.
And of course there are serious discussions about whether
something should be mandatory or recommended, and this
document really doesn't help those at all.
I suppose my broader point is that less-than-useful process
documents waste time, as well, and they clog up the
document stream. I'm afraid I tend to view documents like
this as contributing to our gradual but steady metamorphosis
into a conventional, process-bound standards body.
Our review process is not very
robust--a lot of things slip through the cracks.
Indeed they do, but typically not 2119 mistakes. I have
seen an awful lot of secdir and opsdir reviews go through
that don't have any useful security or operational review
but which have caught tons of nits.
Melinda