Dave Crocker wrote:
the current ietf's track is quite poor, both with respect to timeliness and quality. quite simply we are taking a long time to turn out lots of specifications that tend not to get used very much.
I think we can each find examples on either side of this assertion. MIME took quite some time to get right, for instance, but it's a mighty fine standard. SIP similarly so. IPv6? Remains to be seen. There are others that are less tested and some that are probably unused, but if everything we did was used it would mean that our bar was so high to get stuff through that even more good stuff could have been done. It would be better to have some sort of analysis of this.
so it is unclear that the considerable costs of the current 'quality' mechanisms are working very well.
Fair enough assertion, and an area in which I'm concerned having been told by IESG members previously that they've held up documents just because they were concerned about premature ossification. However, the other side of this argument is that it is onerous to update a standard, and I think it is more due to real installed base matters that IETF procedures. Again, IPv6 probably shows the the most extreme example of this.
you might say that that means we need to get the 10% to a smaller number, but my point is that the 90% is being approved without much benefit to the community (or, apparently, much harm) so it's not clear that all that effort to enforce quality criteria imposed by individual area directors is all that useful...
You need to back up your estimate. It's not reasonable to just accept those numbers without some analysis.
except for frustrating the heck out of all those hard-working working group participants who took so long to create the now-delayed specification...
Certainly this happens. And as to this:
Note the kinds of examples that John cited; there are plenty of opportunities for the IESG to do a good job, but without taking so much time out of an AD's life. However this requires a) prioritizing what ADs will spend their time on and, almost certainly, b) giving up some power.
Depends on who gets that power. If it's the WG chair we have any number of examples where a WG really doesn't do the job well enough for release, the most famous being the one I related earlier.
Eliot
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