On Jun 24, 2011, at 10:46 AM, Donald Eastlake wrote: > An IETF consensus call is judgement as to rough consensus. There is no > mechanical set of rules that can substitute for judgement. > > WG Chairs judge the consensus of the Working Group. It is reasonable > for them to take into account discussions at WG meetings as well as WG > mailing list discussions. > > The IESG judges the consensus of the IETF. It is reasonable for them > to take into account discussions on the WG mailing list and on any > area mailing list or the like, as well as on the IETF mailing list and > discussions at WG, area, and IETF plenary meetings. I think I mostly disagree with this, for reasons stated earlier. Now it might be that, for some specific issue or objection raised during IETF LC to some technical proposal, the IESG could look at the WG record and say "This issue was thoroughly considered by the WG. There's really no way to solve this problem that will satisfy all concerns, and the WG did as good a job at making an appropriate compromise as could be expected." That could be an appropriate way to respond to a dispute over a technical compromise design choice. And in general, I think IESG should give preference to a WG's technical decisions if it's clear that the WG made an effort to understand all of the competing concerns and to strike an appropriate balance between them. I don't think that rationale would apply in the case of 6to4-historic, as there's really no technical need to declare this historic. And the 6to4-advisory document does a much better job at both recommending remedies to the problems that people have (reasonably) complained about, and striking a balance between competing concerns. > If polls at area meetings with 100+ people at them at three successive > IETF meetings on different continents consistently show, say, a 3 to 1 > preference for some proposal but the IETF Last call email has 6 people > speaking against and only 4 in favor, what do you think the right > judgement would be as to the consensus of the IETF community? Of > course, I'm not saying that's what happened hear. But a narrow rules > that the IESG is required to put on blinders and only consider the > IETF discussion list IETF Last Call email, ignoring previous > discussions on other relevant IETF mailing lists and ignoring WG, > area, and IETF plenary meeting discussions they have attended, is just > arbitrary nonsense. I wouldn't agree with that kind of narrow rule either. But when evaluating IETF-wide consensus, it doesn't make sense to just add up all of the yeas and nays in both IETF and WG last call. And in any case where there's not a clear consensus, part of the question should probably be "is there a compelling need for this document or action to move forward at this time?" Sometimes I think people get the idea that they have to approve things "to get them off of their plates" so to speak, and to avoid having to iterate over the document several more times. Keith p.s. My belief is that the 6to4-historic document wouldn't be nearly as divisive if either (a) it were deferred for a year or three or (b) the proponents had been willing to compromise on the status label. When simple changes would suffice to build wide consensus, you have to wonder why there's been so much effort to push through a document for which consensus is dubious at best. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf