My thoughts about the problems of the IETF

[Keith Moore]

> but isn't IETF last-call there for catching the inter WG/inter Area issues? 

1. it's far too late to be effective at catching such issues.  you want to
identify them early on, before a design is frozen
2. working groups cannot be trusted to be responsible at evaluating issues
from outside their narrow focus - or for that matter, to even understand
those issues and give them adequate consideration.
3. a really good way to fail to accomplish something vital is to ask a few 
thousand people to do it, and hope that somebody takes it up.  everyone can
then claim it's someone else's problem.

we need last call for the sake of openness and fairness, but we shouldn't
pretend that it's a good way to do reviews.  think of it as a low-overhead
appeal.

> Anyways, would you have some examples of such cases?

zeroconf is the most immediate example.  ipng is probably another.

> Maybe I'm too naive,
> but I kind of tend to think that the WGs try to do the right thing. 

they usually try to do the right thing as they define it, but that often
is not the right thing for the community as a whole.  the zeroconf people
for instance were so focused on enabling local applications to operate
without a configured network that many of them would ignore repeated examples
given to them of apps that this would break, claiming that they didn't exist.

Keith