My thoughts about the problems of the IETF

[Keith Moore]

> Anyway as I wrote to Brian as well - I sometimes tend to trust a bigger
> group of people to be more objective than a smaller group of people...

often it works exactly the opposite - mob mentality sets in.  

I'm starting to think that our biggest single problem is that the working
group size has become too large.  It is now impossible to brainstorm in a
working group, so a lot of working group conversation is defending turf rather
than making good compromises or finding win-win solutions.  I'm not sure how
to reconcile this with our cherished (and IMHO appropriate) notions of
openness, though.

> I think there may also be a bit of a chicken and egg problem with the IETF
> last-call. As you know that IESG is going to take a look at it, and
> practically the IETF last-call is sometimes not that important anymore,
> people are not paying that much attention on them. 

I think it's more that Last Calls happen off of people's radar.  IETF is so
large, and there are so many documents being reviewed, that your chance of
missing a Last Call for some document that is important to you is high.  That,
and it might not occur to someone in say the Apps area that an Internet area
working group (3 layers down on the stack) is making decisions that will
drastically change how apps need to use the network.  Why would an Apps person
think he needs to review Internet area documents?

> > > Anyways, would you have some examples of such cases?
> > 
> > zeroconf is the most immediate example.  ipng is probably another.
> 
> I do not know zeroconf that well. However, I would be interested to know
> what you see as an example from ipng.  

the whole notion of scoped addresses, and expecting apps and hosts to deal
with multiple addresses of varying scopes and policies, are both highly
questionable from an apps perspective.

> > 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.
> 
> (Just for curiosity:) For instance?

too much detail for this group.  check the zeroconf archives, or bring it up
with me in private mail.

Keith