"Adult supervision"

[Charlie Perkins]

Hello Keith,

It will be better to not exaggerate positions.

Keith Moore wrote:

>>That would be better than nothing.  However, I guess you mean that the 
>>AD doesn't have time to make go through the process of making the
>>explanation official.
>>    
>>
>
>the explanation doesn't have to be in an RFC to be official communication from
>an AD.  an email is also official communication from an AD.  do you really
>want to insist that every bit of AD direction be published as an RFC?
>
That was not constructive.

The claim was made that an AD would have to explain the same thing more
than a dozen times.

The inference I made was that this explanation would be sufficient to derail
a working group effort.

I suggest that anything so important DOES need to be documented.

>usually this isn't something that would kill working group efforts,  it's 
>something that the working group should be doing in order to fulfill 2026 
>requirements for standards-track document quality, but refuses to do.
>
Then it's documented in RFC 2026.  Or did you mean something else?

>
>eventually the more important things probably should be written up as policy
>and published as RFCs.  but again, this can take several years.
>
If something is so important as to have drastic effects, then the IESG 
should
darned well be able to get it published sooner.  Or else the entire 
process is
well and truly broken.  Maybe one of the goals of this group is to make
timely publication possible.  It's important, or else the IETF as a 
whole starts
to be a place for people pushing paper.

>in my experience, very rarely do WGs document the reasoning behind their
>design decisions.  so I don't know which dozens of people you're referring to.
>part of the reason for this may be that WGs don't have to have consensus
>on the justification for their technical decisions, they only need consensus
>on the decisions.
>
I was referring to the dozens of people that all needed the same 
explanation.
If you wish to suggest that protocol documents need to document design
decisions, then that is a subject where people can disagree, but I would
tend to think they should not do so.  It could be that a companion 
Informational
document would be nice sometimes.

Regards,
Charlie P.