Eliot,
This sort of constraint is a safe guard against run away working group chairs attempting to ram through changes by silencing people who have not read the latest draft that came out while people were traveling to the event.
The issue is not the reasonableness of the reason for wanting to do it, but rather the unreasonableness of imposing it on all working groups.
Fear that some groups might stray is not a good reason for treating all groups with that fear.
The IETF used to be quite flexible, permitting many styles of legitimate working group operation. Instead we have let fear of runaway working groups justify more and more burdens. So rather than being a venue that can permit minimal overhead -- where legitimate -- we have become a venue with high overhead for all efforts.
d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://bbiw.net> _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf