General comment on draft-ietf-problem-statement-00.txt

Spencer Dawkins sdawkins at cynetanetworks.com
Mon Mar 3 11:12:07 CET 2003


Hi, Keith,

I believe you when you say that some working groups can't solve
some problems that some ADs can, but ...

If this happens more than about once per year, that's sad, and if
it happens more than once a year to most of the ADs, we're dead.

Because that's the END of scaling.

Spencer, who would be thrilled to see such working groups take their
"outputs" to a less choosy SDO...

p.s. "This document is not the product of an IETF working group. It should
have been, but they failed to produce a draft that would work, so their 
parents did their homework for them" 

- future rfc-editor posting on ietf-announce - or has this already gone out?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Moore [mailto:moore at cs.utk.edu]
[deleted down to]
> 
> At the same time, there is a need for oversight.  Somebody needs to
> sanity-check a WG's output.  Somebody needs to make sure that 
> WGs don't
> break existing standards, or things that are already deployed, and to
> make sure that the outputs of various WGs play well with each other.
> Sometimes that involves saying "this design decision causes problems,
> and this work won't be approved until those problems are fixed".
> 
> I would have been happy if that's the most that I had to do when I was
> an AD.  But sometimes WGs that were told that a particular design
> decision caused problems were not able to figure out how to do things
> another way - sometimes because they lacked expertise; 
> sometimes because
> they lacked imagination or were locked in to a particular 
> mindset.  So I
> often found it necessary to say "I suggest you do things this way" or
> even "here is some text I think would work".  Which greatly 
> increased my
> workload, but at least some of the time it got the document 
> out the door
> faster.  And when I told working groups "here are the 
> constraints; it's
> your job to work out the details of how to solve the problem 
> given that
> set of constraints"  too often they could not do so, and would insist
> that I solve the problem for them.
[deleted down to]
> 
> If WG's don't do due diligence, how can we expect that another review
> body between the WG and IESG is going to do any better?
> 
> Keith


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