On 24/12/2015 00:17, tom p. wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Brian E Carpenter" <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> > To: "Andrew Sullivan" <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <ietf@xxxxxxxx> > Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2015 12:02 AM > >> On 19/12/2015 12:36, Andrew Sullivan wrote: >> <snip> >>> Finally, there's been a great deal of worry about the lack of >>> cross-area review that we get these days,... >> >> I'd want objective evidence that we get less cross-area review than >> at some date in the past before worrying a great deal. It seems to me >> that we are actually doing it more systematically than in the past. > > Brian > > I think that we are doing more, in the shape of Directorate, Gen-ART and > such like reviews but that they may not make the I-D better. > > Any one operating any sort of system will likely know that change > introduces faults which introduce change which .... The art is to get > it right first time and when these late stage reviews introduce changes, >From what I've seen, mainly as a GEN-ART reviewer, *changes* are not what happens at that stage. Corrections - yes. Clarifications to remove ambiguity - yes. But changes of the intent of the protocol, or changes in choices that were a matter of taste or WG preference - no. The IESG is also explicitly supposed to avoid changes for reasons of taste or preference: http://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/discuss-criteria.html#stand-undisc > then I see the I-Ds getting worse, certainly in terms of the coherence > and consistency of the language, probably in terms of technical accuracy > too. Outside people suggest new text which makes sense within their > mindset but may not in the context of what the WG has so far produced; > and by this stage, the WG's energy may be waning, so something that may > have been corrected in a -00 or -01 gets left in in the I-D-(RFC minus one). Yes, that can happen, depending on the shepherd and authors. But it mainly happens in the WG I believe, during the long grind to achieve a WG Last Call with no dissenters. > The best I-D, in some senses, is often the first to be produced, before > adoption by a WG, but that almost always has to be changed and the > longer that that goes on, commonly years, then the less coherent the I-D > is. I am thinking particularly of I-Ds that are too large to be held in > one's mind all at once (which most are). Sure. And that is where another point comes in: the running code point. I watched the DNCP/HNCP sausage being made. Guess what? Those are two complex documents but most of the later changes were in direct response to cross-area review comments *and* comments from implementors. The most powerful response to a review comment is one based on implementation experience. Brian > > Tom Petch > >>> ... but it doesn't seem to me >>> that the meetings obviously help with that except by accident. >> >> But those accidents - hearing about something by chance that you would >> never discover by chance on-line - are a major part of the advantage > of >> our plenary weeks. Being all in one place and time zone allows those >> useful accidents to happen. >> >> Brian >> > >