Subject: [rrg] We have not agreed to irtf-rrg-design-goals-01

From: Robin Whittle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:07:29 +1100

Short version:  The draft RRG Report indicates that the RADIR Problem
                Statement is an implicitly adequate description of
                the routing scaling problem and that there is RRG
                consensus support for irtf-rrg-design-goals-01.

                Yet we are still debating improvements to the RADIR
                Problem Statement and there has been no consensus
                test on the July 2007 irtf-rrg-design-goals-01.

Hi Lixia and Tony,

The Introduction of draft-irtf-rrg-recommendation-05 includes:

  the design goals that we have agreed to can be found in
  [I-D.irtf-rrg-design-goals].

This statement that "we have agreed" is incorrect.  There has been no
consensus test on this ID.  As I wrote in December (msg05495):

    Tony announced irtf-rrg-design-goals-01 on 2007-07-11:

       http://psg.com/lists/rrg/2007/msg00179.html
       http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rrg/current/msg00183.html

    There were only a handful of messages about the design goals
    before this, and I recall not many since then.  I expected there
    would be further revisions, and wrote some detailed material
    about improving the Design Goals on 2009-07-14:

       http://psg.com/lists/rrg/2007/msg00199.html
       http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rrg/current/msg00203.html

    but there has been no discussion of my suggestions or further
    revision of the Design Goals.

Tony wrote recently (msg05497, 2009-02-14):

    When the discussion of the design goals slowed, we judged that to
    indicate rough consensus.

Lixia disagreed (msg05510):

    (no hat) consensus should be explicitly solicited, rather than
    implicitly assumed.

Tony accepted this (2009-12-15):

   http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rrg/current/msg05511.html

      Fair. In any case, we intentionally left the document open as
      it was subject to further revisions.

      Further, it's not clear that the status of the document is
      really relevant to the discussion at hand. Folks are welcome
      to use it if they want.

The messages preceding the writing of draft-irtf-rrg-design-goals-01
appear to be between 2007-04-24 and 2007-05-29.

Since the draft-irtf-rrg-design-goals-01 resulted from minimal
discussions so early in the RRG's work, and has rarely been discussed
since then, and since Tony suggested it wasn't really relevant to the
"current discussion" (writing the RRG Report) perhaps it should not
be mentioned in the RRG Report.  However, as noted below, the
question of what our goals are is absolutely vital to anyone trying
to understand our Report.

If it is mentioned, I suggest something like:

   draft-irtf-rrg-design-goals-01 was announced on 2007-07-11 on the
   basis of some early discussions.  While some changes to it were
   suggested on 2007-07-14, these were neither acknowledged or
   debated.  The draft has not been revised or widely discussed.
   There has been been no test of consensus support for it.

The statement about draft-narten-radir-problem-statement-05 is
potentially misleading:

   The problem being addressed has been documented in
   [I-D.narten-radir-problem-statement]

The RRG has rarely discussed this ID and there has been no consensus
test for support for it.  As I wrote recently (msg06101) this ID has
only had minor updates since version 00 of 2007-07-26.

This ID is an attempt to document the problem, but that does not mean
that the problem is documented (implicitly "documented fully, or
adequately") in any version of this ID to date.  I suggest:

   [I-D.narten-radir-problem-statement] is an attempt at
   documenting the scalable routing problem.  While it has been
   updated somewhat since its inception in July 2007 and occasionally
   discussed in the RRG, in March 2010, it was still being discussed
   and there was no consensus support for it.

Since we are making a recommendation, I think the statement of our
understanding of the problems, and the goals for solving it are
absolutely central to how we evaluate proposals and how we decide
which one(s) to recommend for IETF development.  Likewise, such
statements are vital for anyone trying to understand our final Report.

I do not understand why, in the two and a half years and nearly 6000
messages which have elapsed since irtf-rrg-design-goals-01 was
written, you have not shown more interest in discussing and improving
this ID.

     - Robin

---

From: Tony Li <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:48:35 -0800

> This statement that "we have agreed" is incorrect.

Fair enough.  Wordsmithed.

Tony