After John's note, I've done a little investigating....
- First: WG chair approval of -00 drafts of the form draft-ietf-<wgname> seems to have been around "forever". I could not find the beginning of it, but it's at least before London (IETF-51, August 2001).
- After the San Francisco IETF (IETF-56, March 2003), the secretariat observed that the I-D submissions editor spent significant time chasing down WG chairs to get approval for -00 WG I-Ds. At the same time, people were complaining that I-D processing was slow.
The (new) ExDir (Barbara) consulted with me and suggested that we ask the WG chairs to provide the approval ahead of time, so that the I-D editor knew what was being approved before the I-D actually arrived.
I agreed that this was worth trying.
- This new deadline was first announced as part of the "important dates" announcement message for IETF-56, Vienna (August 2003). There seems to have been no special announcement (in retrospect, this was a mistake).
- Many WG chairs sent in approvals ahead of time as requested. WG -00 drafts coming in without an approval got a bounce message saying "Please get your WG Chair's approval before the -00 deadline", and if this approval was received, it got published.
- This continued with IETF-57, IETF-58 and IETF-59. No comments found in the files I have, so apparently "things worked" - and the I-D publishing got faster in this period.
- For IETF-60, there was a problem with sending out the announce messages with the dates *at all* - resulting in the first announcement of the deadline dates being sent the day before the WG chair approval deadline, which (naturally) was not appreciated by the WG chairs. This resulted in this deadline being added to the Web page of "important dates" (as well as more attention being given to making sure announcements go out).
So, my conclusions from the discussion, tentative:
- Getting enough information to every participant about what the procedures are at any given moment is hard. But it's always possible to do better.
- Once we discuss procedure, there are many process changes that can be suggested - some of which are obviously OK, some of which may be problematic for unexpected reasons.
- Changing the process for IETF-61 is too late.
- The next big change in I-D publication is the one where the tools team has been trying to gather community input - documented in draft-ietf-tools-draft-submission (currently at version -04). If the result of that process is that we can implement this for IETF-62, that will fundamentally change the dynamics of the process, and we need to discuss the deadlines in that light.
Hope this helps put the debate in perspective....
Harald
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