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

[Brian E Carpenter]

John,

In the RFC Ed queue I find 33 documents in the REF state, i.e.
stuck waiting for a normative reference. That's out of just over
60 documents which appear to be the standards/RFC track (that count
is a little hard to establish).

So, this is a fairly significant problem, although I can't deduce
its effect on queuing time from the data. And fairly clearly,
those 33 documents have all left the IESG.

   Brian

John C Klensin wrote:
> 
> --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