A 100.000 foot perspective on "what is the problem"

[Pete Resnick]

On 12/16/02 at 2:51 PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

>Part of the problem is that we don't seem to have any kind of 
>"stick" to use besides outright rejection or delay of the draft by 
>the IESG, at which point some AD gets made out to be the bad guy. It 
>really gets bad, if (for example) the applications AD isn't willing 
>to threaten to fire the working group chair, or disband the working 
>group (which realistically are the only levers even the home AD has 
>to discpline a wayward working group), just because some security 
>weanies are complaining that they aren't getting heard. Then when a 
>security area director votes "discuss" on the document, it's very 
>convenient to blame him or her for delaying the draft.
>
>(Of course, the PACT document will solve this by simply not allowing 
>another AD from blocking a draft. So in the case where some future 
>applications AD doesn't care about security, they will be able to 
>ram a document through the IESG over the security AD's objections, 
>unless the security ADs' can muster a near unanimous objections from 
>all the other IESG members. This is a feature? I'm not convinced....)

I cannot start to describe how much the above disturbs me. It's not 
because you used the Applications Area as an example; I'll assume 
that's a hypothetical. It's that your entire argument assumes that 
there's this common situation in which some area director is so 
completely incompetent that they ignore the good technical input from 
people in other areas, that the area director of the other area 
cannot bring everyone else on the IESG to rough consensus that the 
protocol is broken and vote to "reject", and that therefore they need 
a "stick" in the form of a "discuss" vote (i.e., a veto) to prevent 
this horror from becoming a standards track document.

1. If this is actually the case, the IESG has a much more serious 
problem than we've all been sitting around discussing. You make it 
out as if every AD is just a renegade that the other ADs have to 
defend against. Any IESG member who thinks there's a serious 
technical problem with a document has the responsibility to persuade 
the other ADs to vote to reject such documents. If they cannot 
convince the rest of the IESG of the seriousness of the problem, it 
seems to me that the document should move on over their objections.

2. If something as bad as you describe does happen, the objecting AD 
has two perfectly good levers: Appeal the decision to the IAB on 
technical grounds, or initiate a recall on the incompetent AD. I 
mean, you are talking about an incompetent AD who "rams a document 
through", and the rest of the IESG members who are also incompetent 
for letting that happen. Appeals and recalls seem perfectly justified 
at that point.

Personally, I don't think the situation is as bad as all that. I hope 
not, anyway.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick@qualcomm.com>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102