Subject: Re: [EAI] Co-chair's comments on state of the documents and the WG

From: Shawn Steele <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 21:51:28 +0000

I concede to not being as well-versed about some of the details of email, however I've made sure that Exchange, Office, and other interested people have reviewed the documents.  We have no substantiative problems with the documents, and most of the comments (until Dave's) seem centered around editing and fixing errors in the behaviors, not changing the actual standard.

So: it's unclear what more I can do to speed up the process or get the required review.  Exchange & Office certainly know a lot about mail.  Do we need someone from Google or Yahoo or ??? to chime in?

-Shawn

------------------------------
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 17:19:01 +0900
From: "Martin J. D?rst" <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: [EAI] Co-chair's comments on state of the documents and
	the WG
To: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Cc: IETF EAI WG <[email-masked]>
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Hello John,

I want to make sure that at least somebody replies to your mail.

I don't think at all that I'm qualifying with respect to email 
infrastructure implementation and operation experience; I'm just mostly 
an email user. I can help with internationalization issues, but my 
understanding is that that's not necessarily what's most needed now. I 
may be able to go through some comments and check whether they have been 
applied consistently (essentially a shepherd role?). Getting pointers to 
drafts and mails with comments would help.

On a meta-level, I'm a bit surprised by your comment that we have to 
finish within Alex'es term. I understand that it would be much more 
efficient if Alex could handle our drafts rather than a new AD, and I 
understand that each AD has their preferences for what work they want to 
have happening, and that on occasion very inactive WGs have been shut 
down, but what you wrote below almost sounded like the new AD would just 
shut the WG down without asking anybody, so I hope I'm misunderstanding.

Also, while I think that all your observations were to the point, I 
think a shorter mail, with a subject more like "Wanted: Reviewers for 
XYZ" would have a bigger chance to be read by the relevant people. Also, 
maybe you remember (if only faintly) some of the hands that went up in 
Maastricht or in Beijing, and might be able to contact them directly. On 
average, that gives a better result than anonymous appeals.

Regards,   Martin.

On 2010/12/22 12:59, John C Klensin wrote:
> (writing as co-chair)
>
> Hi.
>
> Folks, I've been watching progress in this WG between some
> weeks before the Beijing IETF and the present.  I think we are
> in serious trouble and want to share that opinion with the WG
> participants.
>
> For a WG to function and make a serious claim to represent IETF
> technical consensus, there has to be significant participation,
> review of documents, etc.  And that has to come from more than
> the group of people writing documents.  In practice, we
> sometimes relax that requirement a bit.  In particular, there
> have been WGs that have been considered successful even though
> there have really been only about a half-dozen really active
> participants.  But that is just not sensible when the WG is
> working on protocols that pose very significant risks to the
> installed base if we overlook important cases.  As we have
> noticed when we have sorted out the various implications of
> extensions on legacy email implementations the EAI effort poses
> just exactly that risk.  The extensive syntax discussion in
> Beijing is an important example of how careful we need to be
> about our decisions.
>
> Our situation is made somewhat more difficult by the
> observation that only a relatively small fraction of the
> participants in the WG have significant personal experience
> with large-scale Internet mail operations or a deep familiarity
> with the existing Internet mail protocols.  As we have seen
> with the reviews Alexey requested from the Apps Area review
> team, when such reviews from the IETF's email expert community
> come at all, they tend to come from outside the WG and tend to
> find things that the WG did not.  That is disquieting to say
> the least.
>
> I note that we got a fairly large number of promises in both
> Beijing and Maastricht to carefully review and comment on
> documents.  Outside the author group and a few others, either
> people did not do those reviews or they lack the skill or
> background to find things that have been discovered by Alexey,
> myself, or others outside the normal group of WG participants.
>
> Clearly, there is a large community, especially among users of
> east Asian languages, who very much want internationalized
> email addresses and headers.  There are other communities with
> similar needs but the they are not well-represented in the WG
> (or have been strangely silent) so, if they have requirements
> that are different from those we have seen already, we are at
> risk of missing them or getting things wrong.  If the IETF
> cannot or will not produce usable specifications, there is
> reason to believe that communities will go off in their own
> directions, resulting in huge interoperability problem in the
> future.
>
> One way of looking at the WG's problem is that there is a
> community of people who are deeply interested in email
> internationalization but who lack either extensive email
> experience or significant experience in writing clear and
> precise IETF specifications (whether the problem is with
> technical English, ABNF, or the way the existing email specs
> are written).  There is also a community who are expert in
> Internet email and the writing of the relevant types of
> specifications, but few of them have been actively involved in
> i18n work and fewer still have time and "day job" support to
> devote to this work.  The two communities are largely disjoint,
> but both are needed to complete the EAI work with great
> confidence about the results being correct and free of
> dangerous side-effects.
>
> In discussions with Alexey, it has become clear that we have
> hard practical deadlines associated with the end of his term as
> AD.  The core documents have to be in his hands and out for
> IETF Last Call within the next several weeks or it seems
> unlikely that the WG will be able finish its work... ever.
>
> Having read the reviews from the last two weeks or so, I think
> it ought to be possible to proceed as follows _if_ WG
> participants are really interested enough in finishing this
> work to put effort into it:
>
> (1) We get some reviewers from inside the WG but outside the
> author group to go through the comments and verify that they
> have been properly disposed of, e.g., that appropriate changes
> have been made to the documents or we have explained why not to
> the satisfaction of the reviewers and/or significant consensus
> of WG participants.
>
> (2) We get ths three base documents into Alexey's hands with a
> request for IETF Last Call really soon -- certainly before
> January 15 and ideally early next week.  That means the
> checking described in (1) needs to occur nearly immediately.
> Bluntly, silence from those of you have have been silent since
> July will have to be taken as indifference on your part to
> whether the documents are completed and the WG continues.
>
> (3) We get some serious suggestions from the WG on how we are
> going to move forward with the two additional groups of
> documents -- (i) POP/ IMAP/ common downgrading protocol
> specifications and (ii) all of the "advice" stuff.  If we can
> find adequate review for the protocol specs, we can presumably
> proceed with them on the same basis that we are using to handle
> the base documents.  I am, however, concerned that we may not
> be able to find that quality of review unless more people
> within the WG start doing serious work.  For the "advice"
> documents, unless we can get a lot of review and input from
> people who are much more experienced with Internet email than
> the WG average --people who could write similar documents for
> non-EAI email and have it be credible-- I suggest that we just
> drop the documents from the WG agenda and handle them as
> individual submissions.  I want to stress that I'm not assuming
> there is anything wrong with the drafts -- the issue is only
> about getting adequate review to convince ourselves and the
> IETF community that those documents really do represent
> community consensus.  Put differently, the problem is not
> getting the I-Ds written; it is having them reflect sufficient
> experience (not just opinions) to be accepted within the
> broader Internet email environment.  Doing so requires noting
> that the Internet email environment has survived well for
> nearly 30 years without such documents.
>
> If people disagree with this rather bleak analysis -- and I
> hope they do -- suggesting areas where I am wrong would be a
> useful first step in convincing us that the WG really does have
> the energy to finish all of the work listed in the charter
> (including the optional tasks).
>
>     best regards and best wishes for anything you may be
>     celebrating at this time of year,
>      john
>
> _______________________________________________
> IMA mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ima
>
>

-- 
#-# Martin J. D?rst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:[email-masked]

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:36:13 -0500

--On Wednesday, December 22, 2010 17:19 +0900 "\"Martin J.

> I want to make sure that at least somebody replies to your

Thanks.

> infrastructure implementation and operation experience; I'm
> just mostly an email user. I can help with
> internationalization issues, but my understanding is that
> that's not necessarily what's most needed now. I may be able
> to go through some comments and check whether they have been
> applied consistently (essentially a shepherd role?). Getting
> pointers to drafts and mails with comments would help.

In addition to checks for consistency and compatibility with the
base email specs and email operations, one of the things I
personally think we most need is careful reading for clarity and
comprehensibility of the text.  I found a lot of problems in
that area in my pre-Beijing reviews, but it will take additional
sets of eyes to verify  that those issues have been adequately
addressed and that I found everything (which I am quite
confident that I did not).

> On a meta-level, I'm a bit surprised by your comment that we
> have to finish within Alex'es term. I understand that it would
> be much more efficient if Alex could handle our drafts rather
> than a new AD, and I understand that each AD has their
> preferences for what work they want to have happening, and
> that on occasion very inactive WGs have been shut down, but
> what you wrote below almost sounded like the new AD would just

As you have suspected, it is a little more complicated than
"Alexey's term".  The [re-]chartering of the WG, my agreement
(and presumably Joseph's) to take over the co-chair, possibly
commitments from some of the authors/editors, and the charter
itself were based, IMO, on three assumptions:

	(i) That we had basic agreement on the technology, with
	a solid footing in the experimental documents and
	implementations that had already been completed and
	tested.
	
	(ii) That there was significant agreement, and some
	specific product drivers, that made "get it done quickly
	and on a very aggressive schedule" a critical goal that
	was important enough to drive WG work and decisions.
	
	(iii) That there was sufficient engagement within the
	WG, and specifically signup for document authoring,
	review, editing, to make (ii) realistic.

Now, from that point of view, slippages to the schedule defined
in the charter benchmarks constitute a much more serious
situation than would be the case if the WG were operating with
more leisure.  We are now three months behind schedule on
headers (5335bis), SMTP (5336bis), and DSN (5337bis).
Realistically, it will be January before those actually go to
the IESG, so make that "four months behind".  We are now a month
behind on submission of IMAP/POP (5378bis, 5721bis, and
draft-ietf-eai-popimap-downgrade) and, since there has been
substantially no WG discussion of any of them other than among
authors and at the Beijing meeting, I assume a more realistic
estimate is 2-3 months behind even if we abruptly see a lot of
comments and participation.

We haven't even started talking about submission servers and a
decision is due this month.  And the various "advice" documents
are even further behind.  There might be time between now and
April for  the mailing list work and anything we might do about
Mailto to catch up, but not unless there is serious WG
engagement... and soon.

While there is no direct link between that situation and
Alexey's stepping down, the situation brings us closer to the
possible point at which someone goes to him and says "this isn't
working: find new editors and leadership and/or considering
rechartering with a different model or closing the WG entirely".
That someone could even be me.   And, if we are going to have
that discussion, I want to have it with Alexey before he steps
down, not someone we have to read in as part of the process.

> Also, while I think that all your observations were to the
> point, I think a shorter mail, with a subject more like
> "Wanted: Reviewers for XYZ" would have a bigger chance to be
> read by the relevant people. Also, maybe you remember (if only
> faintly) some of the hands that went up in Maastricht or in
> Beijing, and might be able to contact them directly. On

I remember.  For the Maastricht meeting, we even have pictures
(in the minutes) of those who raised their hands.  More
important, if the purpose had been to get more specific reviews,
I hope I would have had the sense to write that note.  But it
wasn't.  The intent of this note was to outline the general
status of things to WG participants and to try to make it clear
that, unless there is a lot more engagement --in reviews, but
also in discussions and sorting out specific issues, and across
the WG's task list now just in specific subtopics in which
individuals are interested-- the WG is in serious trouble and
probably on course for shutting down without a lot of the
current tasks being completed.

best,
    john