Document Blocking (Was: I-D

[Keith Moore]

> some background on the blocking documents thread based on my
> experience on the IESG
> 
> lets split documents that the IESG looks at into two piles
> 	1/ documents forwarded to the IESG by the RFC Editor to get the
> IESG's recommendation 
> 	2/ documents that are the product of IETF working groups or
> independent documents (mostly for standards track) that are being
> evaluated as if they were WG documents 
> 
> case 1: 
> the document is normally assigned to a specific AD - that AD does an
> evaluation and comes up with a suggestion as to what the IESG should
> say to the RFC Editor - this can take an arbitrarily long time

does the RFC editor no longer impose a timeout on IESG feedback for
such documents?  (where such feedback could say "we need more time"
or "we're discussing with the author")

> case 2:
> it is quite common for issues/questions to be raised by one or more
> ADs during the IESG evaluation of a document - if the AD(s) feel
> strongly enough that there is an issue that needs to be addresses they
> vote "discuss" - this will block a document until the AD(s) are
> satisfied by revisions in the document or as a result of discussion
> 
> when an AD has an issue with a document and has voted "discuss" the
> document and the issues are discussed during an IESG teleconference -
> sometimes the discussion results in the AD changing their evaluation
> and removing their "discuss"
> 
> generally when an AD keeps their "discuss" after the IESG
> teleconference there is some level of consensus in the IESG that the
> issues raised are real and do need to get fixed - in this case it is
> generally the case that other ADs to not also vote "discuss" to
> indicate their agreement, they delegate one AD as the discuss holder -
> that AD will evaluate the document changes and give a OK when they are
> happy - i.e. the fact that only one security AD is recorded as having
> a discuss on a document should not be read to say that the rest of the
> IESG does not support that discuss

maybe now that the votes are being publicized the IESG might want to
consider changing that.  it was handy to have only one discuss holder
because only one vote had to be changed to move the document forward.
but now perhaps it would be useful for IESG to separate the notion of
"who thinks this document has problems" from the notion of "who has the
token to say when the problems with this document are fixed"

> in my experience, from time to time it was the case that I did not see
> IESG consensus support for the concerns of a specific AD but the
> normal IESG process does not make it easy to get around a single AD's
> discuss - there is a process that was defined to do this but it has
> never been used, and that process would not get around a case where
> two ADs had issues that the rest of the IESG did not share

concur.  very occasionally, it seemed to me that another IESG member's
concerns were either unfounded or too trivial to hold up passage of the
document.  and at least while I was there, we didn't have a good way
to work past those problems.  

(I should clarify that IMHO the vast majority of IESG Discuss concerns
were well-founded and appropriate.)

Keith