On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 10:31 AM, Abdussalam Baryun <abdussalambaryun@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The draft needs to show that if a wg-chair is presenting (in meeting
or on lists) an individual draft to the WG for adoption, and no
answer/reply comes out, that does not mean against nor agree, I
recommend there is no value of no effort from the WG. Some WG may not
respond for adoption because they had no time for making a decision,
so I hope the Chairs don't misunderstand and make wrong decisions.
Calls for adoption are particularly interesting cases, because if there's no response, then as chairman I have to assume there's no interest. This could be because of lack of time, of course, but if merely checking the draft over for adoption isn't worthy of effort, then I can't really expect that once adopted, people will suddenly find the time to do serious work.
In other cases, however, silence can mean assent, or at least no interest in arguing against. If a particular open issue in a draft is resolved by a small group (or even a single person) picking a solution that works for them, then an absence of complaints, despite not being quite the same, nor as desirable, as enthusiastic and vocal support, still leads to the same conclusion.
As for providing engineering reasons... I always prefer strongly to see an solid technical reason for a position. It helps enormously in judging the roughness. But if the reasoning is aesthetic, market-related, or a gut feeling, that's nevertheless useful information. Since we deal in rough consensus, not perfect agreement, even a real technical issue is not enough to break rough consensus sometimes, but any reason might be - and in general terms, I want to encourage open dissent.
This last principle is important for two reasons. The most obvious is that we want to ensure that self-censorship doesn't cause people to avoid speaking up when their concern is well-founded - especially true for less experienced participants who may misjudge the value of their contribution in either way. The other is that someone voicing just a nagging feeling that the solution is "somehow wrong" might well jog other people into noticing some real flaw.
On aesthetic and market-related reasons, two examples:
a) At one stage, the SASL working group were close to abandoning human-readable names for new, GSSAPI-based, mechanisms. People argued against this purely on the basis that it would have discouraged people from implementing these newer mechanisms. This isn't a technical or engineering argument, it's purely aesthetic, but it's nevertheless important.
b) With the on-going discussions about pervasive encryption, it's important to recall that for many parts of the world, it's still against export regulations to allow >56-bit encryption in binary software (ie, non-open-source) to be exported to certain countries. There are strong technical arguments against "export grade" encryption.
Dave.
(With apologies for the lack of flippant sarcasm in this message)