--On Sunday, 26 June, 2022 11:51 -0400 John Levine
<johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> It appears that Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
>>> The best solution will almost always be the responsible AD
>>> making a judgment call as to whether an additional Last Call
>>> is needed and erring on the side of doing one when there is
>>> doubt.
>>
>> It's not the "almost always" cases that I'm concerned about,
>> but the other cases.
>>
>> IOW, a statistical argument isn't convincing here.
>
> Here's a statistical argument: if we made a new rule that all
> modified drafts had to go through last call again, and 95% of
> those drafts had only trivial changes, looking at modified
> drafts would nearly always be a waste of time, so people won't
> look at any of them.
>
> If you're saying that ADs do a bad job of managing their
> documents, that is a conversation we can have, but in a world
> of limited time I would prefer to let them pick the ones to
> rerun so it's more likely people will pay attention.
John,
Without saying anything like "doing a bad job", let me counter
your statistical argument with a philosophical one. At least to
my knowledge, no one has ever made a serious claim that
appointment as an AD endows them, or even the IESG as a whole,
with either omniscience or infallibility. Being human, they
will occasionally get things wrong (or at least inconsistent
with community consensus, which isn't infallible either).
That, it seems to me, is a rather good argument for making it
possible and convenient for anyone who believes there has been
an error in judgment to identify that error and give at least
the responsible AD an opportunity to take a quick second look.
That is what I suggested. I did not suggest a second Last Call
on everything because it would waste time and because I reached
the exact same "won't look at any of them" conclusion you
reached above.
AFAICT, Keith didn't propose a Last Call on every document that
was changed and I haven't either. "Red herring" probably
applies.
Incidentally, your same statistical argument is connected to the
reason I suggested a change log. Probably, like Eric, Brian, and
others, just about anyone who feels the need to do a careful
review of changes to a document is either going to rely on diffs
or rereading the whole thing. If a change log is of any use to
them at all, it is as a location for explanations after they
have already spotted differences that are possibly questionable.
However, for people who have a mild interest but not that level
of commitment or involvement, an IESG announcement that says
something like
The IESG has concluded that there is IETF consensus for
draft-ietf-FOO-BAR and is passing it to the RPC for
editing and publication. Changes since Last Call
started are summarized at
draft-ietf-FOO-BAR-NN#change-log.
_might_ cause at least a few extra people, possibly including
FOO WG participants, to take a quick look. If they look, shrug,
and return to whatever they were doing, so much the better.
But, if one of them thinks they might have spotted a problem and
a look at the actual documents does not change that conclusion,
wouldn't giving the IESG a heads-up (ideally without wasting
IESG and community time on an appeal) be a quality improvement?
Even, or especially, if that is (as we would both expect) very
rare?
best,
john
