The cases when dispatching is needed are probably limited to:
1) Possible conflict with other organizations
2) The answer is probably 'have a BOF'
3) There is possible conflict between existing WGs.
Why not go straight to a BOF? Well quite often the person bringing a problem to IETF does not have the best solution and you want to hammer on the solution space before the BOF. Case in point, I remember one WG where at the very first meeting I said what we needed was to devise a way to do lightweight sub-TLS over UDP. And everyone said 'oh no, we got to do this fast, we are going to have to use this experimental quickstart TCP that nobody actually supports today because changing all the O/S kernels will be so much faster than making something TLS like work over UDP. And then ten years later I was the SECDIR reviewer for doing it over QUIC...
I am always very suspicious of proposals of the form 'we just got to do it this way because we don't have time'. And I am especially suspicious when people are saying that we can only consider this experimental framework protocol we developed and nobody is using it because deployment requires multiple stakeholders to adopt it before it works.
The problem I am having with the last dispatch is one of followup. At the last dispatch, someone said a problem is 'impossible'. Now I have running code which provides three separate solutions with different limitations, one of which could become a universal solution.
There was a proposal for a BOF. But surely we should have discussions before a BOF? Surely there should be a mailing list where people with proposals could discuss before we arrive? Maybe we can come to an agreement on a common approach before the BOF in which case the BOF can be shorter.
Where can I find out what the followup is? I would be rather displeased if the BOF ends up being an in-crowd with one particular view presenting their proposal.
I think we are going to need a BOF in that case because the problem in question cuts across multiple areas of existing IETF work and is going to be constrained by each.
On Tue, Nov 26, 2024 at 5:10 PM Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 26/11/2024 21:58, Pete Resnick wrote:
> Someone tell me why I'm wrong.
Because dispatch sessions are being used to add more hoops through
which people need jump.
Person: "Hi WG, I have this idea..."
Chair: "Not sure, goto dispatch"
Dispatch: "Not sure, have a BoF"
BoF: "You should goto WG"
Person: "That's were I started but the chairs bottled it
and pushed me to go all around the dispatch world just to
get back here again."
I've seen stuff like that happen. We're doing too much of
this dispatching and making some obvious things harder and
take longer. (Where the obvious answer might be yes/no/BoF/
etc. or "This WG will take it on, if other-WG doesn't have
a problem")
The only times where dispatching is needed is in the rare
case when it's not obvious how to get the answer referred
to above. (That does not mean the actual answer is obvious
but that how to get the answer is obvious.)
Cheers,
S.
