Subject: RE: WG Mailing List Web Archives

From: Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 15:23:44 -0400

If you are going to do that, you might as well just force a single point of failure and require all working groups to host their mailing lists with the Secretariate. Currently, for those hosted elsewhere, the Secretariate archives are a backup and the archives maintained by the list maintainer are more authoritative.

(I'm of the old school and think that if a group can't get their act together enough to find resources outside the Secretariate to host their WG list, there shouldn't be a WG at all. The size, activity, etc., of different WGs varies widely and its not clear to me that any hosting service fits all. So I really don't see why the IETF budget is paying for Secretariate support of any but a few lists like the IETF announce/discuss/nomcom/iesg/... lists.)
 
Donald

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of [email-masked]
Sent: Monday, June 07, 2004 2:52 PM
To: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: WG Mailing List Web Archives

since the Secretariat is supposed to be maintaining archives for
*all* working group lists - I see no reason for the conditional in
this letter - the Secretariat should point to their own copy of
the archive not archives maintained by someone else

Scott

-------

>From [email-masked]  Mon Jun  7 14:44:10 2004
From: The IETF Secretariat <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 12:52:25 -0400
Cc: 
Subject: WG Mailing List Web Archives
Sender: [email-masked]

Dear IETF Working Group Chairs:

Approximately 80 percent of the working group charters on the IETF Web site include 
the URL for the HTML-format Web archives in the "Mailing Lists" section. We would like
to update the remaining charters by replacing the URLs for the raw-format archives 
with the URLs for the HTML-format Web archives, where applicable.

The Secretariat maintains HTML-format Web archives as well as raw-format archives 
for all working group mailing lists hosted @ietf.org. Therefore, we can update 
the charters for these groups without further assistance. However, we do not have 
the URLs for the HTML-format Web archives of those working group mailing lists that 
are hosted elsewhere. Therefore, if your mailing list is not hosted @ietf.org, and 
if you maintain HTML-format Web archives as well as raw-format archives for the list,
then we would appreciate your sending us the URL for the HTML-format Web archives so 
that we can include it in the charter.  Please send the information to 
[email-masked].  If you do not maintain HTML-format Web archives for your 
list, then we will continue to include the URL for the raw-format archives on your 
charter page.

The IETF Secretariat

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From: Paul Hoffman / VPNC <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 14:40:58 -0700

Scott is correct. If the definitive archive is always kept at the 
IETF, all links should be to there. It sure would make it more 
obvious when people didn't have their IETF-based archive up to date.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 16:07:58 -0700

--On 7. juni 2004 14:40 -0700 "Paul Hoffman / VPNC" <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> Scott is correct. If the definitive archive is always kept at the IETF,
> all links should be to there. It sure would make it more obvious when
> people didn't have their IETF-based archive up to date.

I don't follow this logic - if we have a process that has been broken for 
several years, making it more visible is an advantage?

Not to mention the fact that the "offical" archives are text-based, not 
HTML-based.

Long term, I suppose so. But in the meantime - could people do what Barbara 
requested?

                      Harald

---

From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 19:54:27 -0400

> Not to mention the fact that the "offical" archives are text-based, not

For that matter, I'm not convinced the "definitive" archives _are_ the ones 
the secretariat keeps.  RFC2418 says...

         A message archive
         MUST be maintained in a public place which can be accessed via
         FTP or via the web.

The next paragraph goes on to say what is required to take advantage of the 
secretariat's archive, but I've never read it as requiring that working 
groups actually take advantage of the archive.

Many mailing list packages have the ability to automatically maintain a 
_definitive_ archive - that is, one that contains exactly the set of 
messages that were actually forwarded to the list.  Such archives are not 
subject to spam or other attacks involving sending mail directly to the 
archiver (at least, not beyond whatever the list itself is subject to), and 
are also not susceptible to messages being bounced or dropped en route by a 
misconfigured or overloaded MTA.

Given this, I have to agree with Don Eastlake -- WG charter pages should 
point to the _authoritative_ archive, which in many cases will not be the 
one maintained by the secretariat.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <[email-masked]>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2004 20:06:18 -0700

--On 7. juni 2004 19:54 -0400 Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]> wrote:

> The next paragraph goes on to say what is required to take advantage of
> the secretariat's archive, but I've never read it as requiring that
> working groups actually take advantage of the archive.

The text is:

         As a service to the community, the IETF Secretariat operates a
         mailing list archive for working group mailing lists. In order
         to take advantage of this service, working group mailing lists
         MUST include the address "[email-masked]"
         (where "wg_acronym" is the working group acronym) in the
         mailing list in order that a copy of all mailing list messages
         be recorded in the Secretariat's archive.  Those archives are
         located at ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive.  For
         robustness, WGs SHOULD maintain an additional archive separate
         from that maintained by the Secretariat.

This is badly phrased. The theory I've been exposed to is that the mailing 
list archive is in fact the record of our deliberations, and that not 
keeping a record allows all sorts of nasty things to happen when people 
want to figure out whether or not someone was behaving illegally when 
developing a standard.

Thus, I have read it as saying that the secretariat MUST have one set of 
records, and the WG itself SHOULD have another set; the service is to the 
community, not to the working group.

People who come knocking at the door with subpoenas kind of expect us to 
have institutional memory.

                     Harald

---

From: Jeffrey Haas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2004 09:37:33 -0400

> community, not to the working group.

Additionally, ietf.org is more likely to be around than some other
resources.  This may be due to any number of reasons including changes
in employment and affiliation.  While a friendly transition, idr@merit
serves as an example where a mailing list was long maintained at
a particular location and eventually transitioned due to changes in
affiliation and a change of organizational mission.

-- 
Jeff Haas 
NextHop Technologies