--On Tuesday, April 27, 2021 16:01 +0300 Lars Eggert
<lars@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2021-4-27, at 15:40, Keith Moore
> <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> The very notion of "adoption" of a draft by the IETF (or at
>> least by a working group) is a Bad Idea, as it tends to
>> indicate an assumed direction for the WG that isn't yet
>> reflected by a deep understanding of the draft or its
>> implications, and makes it harder for a WG to change
>> direction.
>
> I'm not sure I follow. WGs have adopted I-Ds for decades; it's
> the usual way in which the IETF works, and is what causes I-D
> names to change from draft-yourname to draft-ietf.
Actually, Lars, formal adoption -- in the form of requiring that
draft-yourname-... exist before it could be reissued or revised
and posted as draft-ietf-wgname... -- and requiring more or less
formal consensus calls to adopt in the WG are a fairly recent
development. For much longer, that transition was a matter for
the individual WG and its style, with the initial versions of
some documents being posted as draft-ietf-wgname... with only
the permission of, or encouragement from, a WG Chair who was
presumably operating on a general sense of the WG and what would
move things forward. It was possible for that approach to be
abused although, at least in my experience and awareness, it
rarely was and, if it was, the WG usually had much more serious
problems.
IIR, the draft-ietf-wgname convention arose, not as an
indication of status but simply to make it easier to find
documents that a WG was working on or had associated with it.
That was long before there was a datatracker or general tools
much stronger than sorting and grep.
It is easy to make a case that we have gained from the
additional formality and procedural steps, but it has not been
that way forever and, in some cases, it has almost certainly
slowed things down without significant benefit. And it has
occasionally has had the downside of encouraging people to treat
or promote WG documents -- ones that were really no more than
preliminary working drafts -- as "nearly standards".
> This process is central to our way of working; we even
> commissioned specific datatracker functionality for it ten
> years ago (RFC6174) and discussed the common practice in
> RFC7221.
But, as I pointed out in another note, RFC 7221 is actually
extremely relaxed about the degree of "finished" and about when
consensus about actual content is required. In that sense, it
is completely consistent with long term practice.
While I disagree with much of what Keith has written, I'm in
sympathy with where I think he is coming from. And I think we
would be much better off if we reserved the term "WG consensus"
for describing a document and its content until it had been
through WG Last Call or some equivalent procedure by which the
WG decides it is ready for forwarding to the IESG, recommending
an IETF Last Call. Before that "adopted by", "being used as a
basis for discussion in", or something similar, might be much
more appropriate, accurate, and less likely to cause confusion
or be misused.
best,
john
