Normative references (was: Re: Killing old/slow groups - transition thinking)

[John C Klensin]

--On Thursday, 12 December, 2002 08:27 +0100 Harald Tveit
Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no> wrote:

> to be more exact.... APEX is awaiting the completion of a
> document in another WG (draft-ietf-impp-pres, if I'm not
> mistaken) so that a normative reference to the common stuff
> that the APEX presence stuff is supposed to be conformant to
> can be satisfied.

Harald,

This is a question to which I don't know the answer:  How often
are our traditional "no normative references to standards-track
documents at lower maturity levels" rules a significant
(long-period) blocking factor to getting WG work out and
finished?  

If the answer is "very often", should we be thinking, as a
community, about ways to reduce that impact?  In addition to
just dropping the rule, which I don't think I'd favor, I can
think of a number of ways reduce its impact.  E.g., one could
think about intermediate documents that would explain what was
needed in the lagging ones and thereby dereference them a bit.
Or we could think about "preprint" RFCs that would be final
except for filling in the final form of the references.  Or...

But those are not trivial changes and should not be considered
unless this is really a significant problem.  Do you have
statistics or just a good sense?

Also, out of curiosity, my recollection is that the historical
way of dealing with documents with dangling normative references
was for the IESG to process them, issue protocol action notices,
and hand them off to the RFC Editor with a note calling
attention to the reference.  The RFC Editor could then begin the
editing process, but publication would then sit in a special
place in the queue until the other documents appeared and
references could be resolved.   Am I to understand that these
things are now stuck in the IESG instead and, if so, why?

    john