Re: Internet Draft Submission cutoff dates

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On Jan 18, 2008, at 10:56 AM, John C Klensin wrote:

> Hi.
>
> The current cutoff schedule for Internet Drafts dates from my
> time on the IESG (i.e., is ancient history).  It was conditioned
> on the pre-IETF rush and the observation that the Secretariat,
> at the time, required a sufficiently long time to get drafts
> posted in the pre-meeting rush that, unless there was a two-week
> cutoff, we couldn't reliably have all expected documents in hand
> prior to the start of the meetings.
>
> Splitting the "new" and "revised" drafts was a further attempt
> to compensate when the load built up enough that the choices
> were between such a split and moving the submission deadline for
> _all_ I-Ds back even further.  The conclusion was that a split
> was desirable because a three-week cutoff for revisions would
> seriously interfere with WGs getting work done in the run-up to
> IETF meetings.
>
> With the automated posting tools typically getting I-Ds posted
> in well under an hour and a tiny fraction of the documents being
> handled manually, the original reasons for the submission
> cutoffs no longer apply.  It is still reasonable, IMO, to have a
> cutoff early enough to permit people to receive and read
> documents before departing for the meetings, but it seems to me
> that criterion would require a cutoff a week (or even less)
> prior to the meeting, not two or three weeks.  Other models
> about giving people time to read might suggest leaving the "new
> document" cutoff at three weeks before the meeting, but seeing
> if we could move the "revision" cutoff considerably closer to
> the meetings.

Makes sense - also the IESG agree to something along lines of moving  
the deadline for drafts that are moving from individual to 00 WG  
drafts to be the same as deadline for non 00 drafts but I don't know  
that has been implemented yet or not.

>
>
> I don't necessarily object to retaining the current two and
> three week posting deadlines, but I'd like to know that the IESG
> has done a careful review of those deadlines and their
> applicability to the current environment and concluded that they
> are still appropriate, rather than having the secretariat retain
> them simply on tradition and autopilot.

I don't think the IESG has done a review of these times - and I agree  
the new tools certainly change some of the reasons that caused the old  
times to be chosen.  At least one of the reason they IESG has not  
looked at them is just  the IESG is working on other things. As a  
result, the status quo ends up being the default decision.

Speaking only as an individual contributor here, I 100% agree with you  
that we want these times to be as short as possible yet still leave  
enough time that people have a reasonable chance to read the material  
before the meetings so we don't have to run tutorials in the valuable  
WG meeting time. It may be that the right time is actually different  
for some WG or areas though that would be complicated to have in  
practice. Often the time right before an IETF meeting lands on a major  
holiday further reducing the time and we have travel time so I think  
theses needs to be taken into to account when thinking about how much  
time is needed. For the past several meetings I have tried to read or  
at least skim all the documents that are the agenda of any RAI WG  
meeting. I would expect that most ADs would be reading at least all  
the documents in the WG they were the responsible AD for. Looking at  
the authors and key contributors of WG documents in RAI, I see that  
there are many that are very active in over 2/3 of the RAI WG +  
Behave.  When I look at the number of WGs that some of the IAB members  
participate it in, it is also very large.

I can send you my reading lists for IETF 68 and 70 and it is a bit  
hard to count "real pages"  that don't include all the boiler plate  
stuff.  For ietf 68, which was a very heavy reading list for me, it  
had about 250 drafts with a "wc -w" word count of a bit under 2  
million words. While IETF 70 which was very light had around 120  
drafts with a word count of around to 0.9 million words. A large  
percentage of these were revisions of drafts I had previously read  
which greatly speeds things up - clearly no one is going to read this  
many drafts where it is the first time to looked at them. At ietf 68,  
about 70 of the drafts out of the 250 were 00 drafts but some of those  
were just renames so hard to count without a more detailed look.

Some drafts I can read in 15 minutes if I am not sending any comments  
and they are short and familiar. A complicated draft where I might  
have to go and reread some other background draft or RFC and I send  
significant comments will take four hours. Now I have the luxury of  
being able to use most of my time to read drafts right before an IETF  
but I think the time also needs to work for people who participate in  
several WGs and are reading during their "own time" vs. their  
"employers time".

If you asked me today if I would make the time longer or shorter, I  
have no idea which I would say. I do think that looking at various  
groups of participants, who much they need to read, and how much time  
they have to do it, is the right way to figure this out.

Cullen <with my individual contributor hat on>

>
>
> thanks,
>   john
>
>
>

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