Subject: RE: draft-ietf-aaa-diameter-17

From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 10:25:58 -0700 (PDT)

*>
  *> As a WG chair, I just wanted to point out that the queue listed above
  *> is usually quite cryptic - I myself have trouble really understanding
  *> what the states mean in the queue. I was wondering if there is room
  *> for improvement in the system - you meantion that the internal
  *> documentation has dirty data - would it be difficult to create
  *> a system to publish a sanitized version of the data, so we could
  *> track status more closely?  For example, from your next note,
  *> detailing the status of Diameter:

John,

We thought that the process flow chart (see
www.rfc-editor.org/howtopub.html for link) defined the states pretty
clearly.  (We have also shown this in Plenaries).  We would welcome
input on how to make it clearer.

However, the fact is that wierd and omplicated things happen sometimes,
various resets/revisions in the middle of the process.  That was the
case with the aaa document discussed previously.  It is difficult to
know how to encode some of these clearly into a simple state diagram,
and it is difficult to extract meaningful averages for times in various
states.  Finally, we try not to spend a lot of time on very detailed
bookkeeping to accurately track some of the gyrations that sometimes
happen, preferring to spend our time on publication.

  *>
  *>  IANA Action items completed on April 16.
  *>  (Specifically creating a new registry and populating it.)
  *>
  *>  Almost ready for Auth48 on June 13.
  *>
  *>  Placed back in to IANA state on June 13.
  *>
  *> I worked with IANA to setup the registry.  If I had known that
  *> that work was not done (or at least incomplete), I would have
  *> been more pro-active.  However, I had seen that it was stuck
  *> in the queue due to IANA - I assumed (which was my mistake)
  *> that this was a bug & it was stuck in the queue for some other
  *> reason.
  *>

Well, we don't quite know how to respond to this... ;-) We gave you
correct information in this case, so we don't quite know what we
could have done better.

So, the bottom line for WG chairs is (1) look in the queue, (2)
if you don't understand the state or why it is still there, ask
us.  Or ask you AD, since the ADs are often involved in the messy
cases and generally track the process pretty closely.

When things go right, which is generally the majority of the time, our
general guideline of 1-2 months for the entire editorial and
publication process still seems generally correct.  A burst of very
large documents can briefly bottleneck the process, as can a lot of
IESG special requests for priority processing (there have been a lot of
these recently, to satisfy demands of other standards bodies.)

We hope that this helps,

Bob Braden, for the RFC Editor

  *> thanks,
  *> John
  *>