Gert Doering wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 11:05:29AM -0400, Keith Moore wrote: > > The best way to not rat-hole is just to drop the proposed action. > > One voice doesn't make it "consensus to drop". In the IETF, that is supposed to be possible. A single technical or procedural issue that is raised before or during Last Call and not resolved precludes IETF rough consensus. intention behind this include (using words from rfc2418): good working group consensus about a bad design. While the Tao (rfc-4677) is only informational, it seems to capture the IETF spirit quite good: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code". The lack of formal voting has caused some very long delays for some proposals, but most IETF participants who have witnessed rough consensus after acrimonious debates feel that the delays often result in better protocols. (And, if you think about it, how could you have "voting" in a group that anyone can join, and when it's impossible to count the participants?) Rough consensus has been defined in many ways; a simple version is that it means that strongly held objections must be debated until most people are satisfied that these objections are wrong. or look at rfc-4858, later parts of section 3.2, another Informational but valuable document. e.g. if an implementor raises an issue, one should carefully listen and talk about it, even if it is just one single implementor. The opposite, an implementor that does not see a problem is not proof of anything (as we can see from regular interop problems showing up only during interop tests). Reading specs correctly (and carefully) seems to be less common than is desirable. The purpose of the discussion is to seperate issues of taste (where significant majority decisions are OK) from technical&procedural issues and resolving all of the latter categorie(s) or determining technical issues to be out-of-scope. WG chairs and ADs have a significant discretion, and I've seen it happening that they got too personally involved, inducing a non-marginal bias on the issue resolution process in situations where this was unnecessary and not appropriate. That may or may not result in worse decision. But it is conceived as unfair by those holding the objections and a problem by itself because it regularly taints other discussions on other work items. -Martin _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf