Subject: [newtrk] Re: Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-carpenter-newtrk-questions-00.txt]

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2006 09:20:24 +0200

FYI

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-carpenter-newtrk-questions-00.txt]
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2006 09:17:29 +0200
From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Organization: IBM
To: IETF discussion list <[email-masked]>

I invite the IETF community to read this draft and discuss the choices
it suggests, between now and the Montreal IETF.

     Brian

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-carpenter-newtrk-questions-00.txt
Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2006 15:50:01 -0400
From: [email-masked]
Reply-To: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title		: Questions about the standards track
	Author(s)	: B. Carpenter
	Filename	: draft-carpenter-newtrk-questions-00.txt
	Pages		: 10
	Date		: 2006-6-9
	
    This document sets out some thoughts about three possible directions
    for further work on the evolution of the IETF standards track.  Its
    purpose is to stimulate community discussion leading to a choice
    between these three directions.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-carpenter-newtrk-questions-00.txt

.
newtrk resources:_____________________________________________________
web user interface: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~llynch/newtrk.html
mhonarc archive: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~llynch/newtrk/index.html

---

From: "C. M. Heard" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2006 22:05:19 -0700 (PDT)

[ follow-ups to IETF discussion list please]

Of the three possible ways forward suggested by this draft, I think that
the only one that's likely to get done is this one:

   1.  Agree that, apart from day to day efforts to improve efficiency,
       the problems with the existing standards track are not serious
       enough to justify the effort needed to make substantial changes.
       Conclude that [RFC3774] exaggerated the problem and we only need
       to make a relatively minor set of clarifications to BCP 9
       [RFC2026].

I say this because the newtrk WG has already tried to do the other two
things that were suggested (focusing on document relationships and
reworking the standards track) and failed.  The deafening silence on
the WG mailing list suggests to me that the energy has run out of this
WG and it should be closed.

I believe that two modifications (not clarifications) to RFC 2026
would suffice:

- drop the expectation that a document will necessarily ever advance,
and drop the requirement for periodic reviews of documents at PS or DS;

- drop the "no normative downrefs" rule.

This last should be done with an absolute minimum of fuss and with no
imposition of requirements to put special notes in the documents
about downrefs.  If we can't agree on that, then I would settle for
just the first modification.  That would at least get our documented
procedures more in line with the reality that we practice.

Mike Heard

.

---

From: Douglas Otis <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 00:41:17 -0700

> procedures more in line with the reality that we practice.

There isn't necessarily a lack of energy. How to deal with the confusion
created by a system failing to organize information?

It does not appear to be a satisfactory solution describing the lack of
maintenance related to document categorization lame and leave it, as
this appears to suggest.  When the newtrk wg had last met, there did
appear to have been progress made defining a method to formally describe
the relationship between sets of documents.

Had that proceeded, stable and serialized references would have been
established for organized sets.  From those references, less effort
would be needed to process the categorization, by looking down from the
top, rather than by lookup up from the bottom.  These two views are very
different, and describing a document as a thing unto itself often makes
little sense. RFC3377 is an example of an effort to define a set, but
this type of approach is clumsy and adds little visibility.

Perhaps this organizational effort needs to move elsewhere.  The
direction that was envisioned for the SRD proposal was to ensure the
IETF members compose those sets without altering the individual
documents.  A follow-on categorization of these sets would cull out the
best and most meaningful by raising the status of those sets
appropriately. This should overcome maintenance issues and avoid downref
problems.

Newtrk could still contribute by taking meaningful steps to transform
the ever flattening and broadening landscape that offers ever fewer
landmarks, by providing form and dimension. RFCxxxx DS PS and BCPxx can
be improved by providing the minimalist organization of these documents
into Name.Serial sets.  XML seems to be a natural way to achieve that
goal, which should also be integrated into the IETF HTTP presentations.

The construction of the XML documents could even be developed using
web-based tools, rather than expecting everyone to use their own XML
editors, or to know how to read and check the required syntax. The SRD
proposal also allowed a temporary prefix.

This prefix conveyed Work In Progress to impose fewer barriers for those
wishing to take advantage of these tools at the conception of an idea.
The organization of documents into sets could help at very early
efforts, all the way to completion.  This becomes a forward/downward
perspective, as opposed to the current backward/upward perspective,
where it become hard to see the forest for the trees.

-Doug

.