Please see inline.
I really appreciate your making your way through the document
despite your lack of experience with what you refer to as the
arcana.
My apologies; by employing the term "arcana", I did not intend to be pejorative in any sense.
It is a good thing, in my opinion, that we in the IETF are comfortable discussing such arcana
in the protocols that we create.
That said ...
Your review identifies a general problem with many IETF
"area" reviews. Using this document as an example, it, and its
companion, draft-klensin-idna-unicode-review, are essentially
just clarifying updates to he base IDNA document collection. A
review for substantive technical issues requires a thorough
understanding of those base documents in order to understand
what is being clarified or changed, and why, and what the state
of things was (and would continue to be) without the updates.
If you didn't follow that work and aren't interested and
motivated to dig deeply into it today, we can't expect you to do
that review and I (and I hope others), are very grateful for the
more general reviews you and others are doing. However, I think
the IETF (and the IESG in particular) needs to keep in mind that
the type of review you have done, while very important and
useful, is not a substitute for that more specific type of
in-depth technical reviews. We need both and it is not clear to
me that we are doing as good a job of the latter as we used to.
... I suspect that the IESG, in general, recognizes that the reviews done by members of the
Gen-ART team are generalist in nature and not specific to the details that are apparent to
the specific WG tasked with producing that I-D.
The purview of the Gen-ART review is provided in [1], and my apologies if you are already
familiar with the mission of Gen-ART. If not, the quoted text in [1] appears to address your
concern that the IESG is aware that my review is definitely not a substitute for an in-depth
technical review that can be provided by members of the WG. (On occasions that as a
Gen-ART reviewer, I get an I-D that pertains to the work I do and the WGs I participate
in, then I relish going deeper into the technical aspects as well.)
Quoting the relevant parts from the above URL, "The GEN-ART reviews are performed for one of
three reasons. Most Gen-ART reviews are now assigned at IETF Last Call (answer #1). If
a document is revised after IETF Last Call, or is processed so quickly that no
Gen-ART reviewer has been assigned, it's reviewed after being placed on the IESG Telechat
agenda (answer #2). Some ADs also request an Early Review before IETF Last Call - typically
once the document is considered fairly mature and stable within the working group (answer #3).
Gen-ART reviewers are supposed to provide generalist reviews to Gen-ART (when reviewers are
experts in a particular field, they should provide expert review to the working group, prior to
IETF Last Call), so reviewers may recuse themselves...."
Cheers,
- vijay
