--On Friday, 18 January, 2008 13:18 -0600 Eric Gray <eric.gray@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > John, > > Your description of the reasons for having the draft sub- > mission dead-lines may agree with original thinking that went > into setting them, initially. However, there were collateral > benefits that the new automated submission process helps to > improve - but does not eliminate. > > For the people who participate in a fair number of working > groups in the IETF, requiring early posting allows for a > greater likelihood that they will be able to at least skim > each new draft sometime before setting up their laptop at the > beginning of each meeting in which that draft will be > discussed. Eric, To be clear, I was not advocating doing away with the cutoff. I think cutoffs are a good idea, for exactly the reasons you suggest and because they avoid any necessity for per-WG rules about deadlines to prevent a particularly nasty way of gaming the system. I just want to be sure that the intervals we have been using are still appropriate. > Moreover, having a week longer grace period for subsequent > submissions also makes sense from this same perspective - > because it is usually the case that there is less new material > to absorb in a -01 or subsequent version than there was in a > -00 version. Not always, but usually. One exception is when a > draft becomes a working group draft - which means it becomes a > -00 version with virtually no change from a previous (often a > -03 or -04) version. Just for purposes of discussion (I do not have any strong positions on this other than a desire to have it reviewed), I think it makes a lot of sense to require a long lead time on new drafts in order that people have a way to consider new concepts, whether they want to attend particular WGs, etc. Three weeks does not strike me as unreasonable for that purpose. And the draft-transition exception you mention is already part of the rules. However, in many WGs, we see a lot of work done in the weeks before an IETF meeting, both before and after the current posting deadline. I think it is in our interest to have WGs looking at drafts that are as up-to-date as possible, consistent with everyone in the WG having a reasonable opportunity to read them before the actual meeting. So I'm not sure that two weeks is optimal for revision drafts. Perhaps the tradeoffs would work better at a week before, or perhaps at some other interval. I suspect that setting the revised draft cutoff much shorter than a week before the meeting would mean that some people would not be able to review them before beginning to travel to the meetings and that the Secretariat might not have time to manually process whatever needed to be manually processed, but I don't know. I do not think it is either wise or useful to try to design the details of this on the IETF list (nor do I think you were suggesting that either) and hope my note does not set off a long thread. I believe it is reasonable for us to ask the IESG to think about the issue, make a decision and tell us. I'd prefer to hear about their reasoning, but I can live without even that. I just don't think it is reasonable to continue automatically with the current cutoffs when the reason for setting those particular cutoff values has largely disappeared. And I wanted to mention the question on the IETF list precisely because I hope that this is not an appropriate subject for an RFC3933 experiment. john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf