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Re: To "lose the argument in the WG"

2017-02-14 17:18:55
On 15/02/2017 06:05, Dave Crocker wrote:
...
      IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures
      https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2418

   This Last Call will announce the intention of
   the IESG to consider the document, and it will solicit final comments
   from the IETF within a period of two weeks.  It is important to note
   that a Last-Call is intended as a brief, final check with the
   Internet community, to make sure that no important concerns have been
   missed or misunderstood. The Last-Call should not serve as a more
   general, in-depth review.

(I should note that that text dates back to the original version of the 
document that Erik Huizer and I wrote, in RFC 1871, in 1994.)


What folks are doing is spontaneously changing the role of this step, 
ignoring the considerable costs and detriments, while relying on a 
theory of benefit that is very, very, very rarely actually demonstrated.

Two points on this:

1. A claim that a choice made by the WG is not only harmful to the
protocol under review but *also* harmful to the Internet as a whole
would, I hope, always be legitimate under "no important concerns
have been missed" during IETF Last Call. That's certainly the basis
of an issue that I raised recently.

2. As a Gen-ART reviewer I've often seen drafts at IETF LC that
really *need* a general, in-depth review. As a matter of fact, as
a document editor, I just received such a review yesterday (whether
needed or not is not for me to say). So I'd say that that phrase in
RFC2418 takes a very optimistic view of quality control by WGs.

    Brian