Late surprises redux [Re: The IETF's problems]

Brian E Carpenter brian at hursley.ibm.com
Wed Jul 23 09:35:07 CEST 2003


We discussed this some months ago under the subject 'avoiding
late surprises.' The conclusion was that the major process bug here
is that early drafts are not reviewed for IETF-wide issues.
Of course nobody can rationally expect the IESG to take on the
extra work of reviewing early drafts.

Hence draft-carpenter-solution-sirs-01.txt, whose discussion
belongs on solutions at alvestrand.no

   Brian

Keith Moore wrote:
> 
> > > because, left to themselves, WGs will happily create things that
> > > don't satisfy various requirements (such as security), or which
> > > interfere with other parties' interests (like zeroconf or nat WGs
> > > trying to fundamentally change the way IP works), and then the WGs will
> > > get very annoyed when they only learn *after* they think they're done
> > > why IESG (for quite valid reasons) refuses to approve their documents
> > > and their work isn't even fixable.
> >
> > I don't think the annoyance can be avoided in cases like this. All this
> > work just to move the moment when this happens around doesn't seem like
> > a very effective use of time and energy.
> 
> so if you're trying to go somewhere, you'd rather just start out travelling in
> a random direction, and wait until you think you should be there to find out
> that your course is 90 degress off?
> 
> > And does the current way of doing this really work?
> 
> not as well as we'd like.  that's one of our biggest problems.
> 
> > And what's the problem with zeroconf anyway?
> 
> it breaks widely-held assumptions about the scope and stability of IPv4
> addresses.
> 
> > > what I don't get is why anyone could think that WGs should be allowed
> > > to make standards without some broad-based oversight.
> >
> > The current way of doing this doesn't work very well. If someone can
> > come up with something better, that would be great. If not... then we
> > need to be more radical.
> 
> so if banging your head against a foam pillow doesn't work, try banging it
> against a brick wall?


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