Subject: RE: I-D submission tool draft

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:18:07 +0300

Jari,

>   The other question is if we should allow anyone to
>   submit. For new drafts, the answer is yes, I think.
>   For old drafts, I would propose that any of the
>   authors of the old revision can post a new one.
>   Then we have many cases of the-old-authors-are-no-longer-
>   interested-and-someone-else-took-over; those can be
>   handled by the manual e-mail based approach just fine.

I agree and would like to add a point - for WG submissions,
then the WG chair(s) should also be notified.  If we do this,
we could tie-in an explicit/implicit approval process by the
WG chair.  I'd prefer implicit, meaning that if I get notified
of a new WG submission, I would have to take a step to deny
it - otherwise it will be implicitly approved.

John

---

From: Magnus Westerlund <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:03:05 +0200

Hi John,

> it - otherwise it will be implicitly approved.

I am not agreeing with you on the implicit approval process. At least in 
my WG (AVT) it is quite common that people are somewhat confused on the 
process and do not sufficiently understand the distinction between WG 
documents and individual submission. In addition we are allowed by the 
AD as WG chairs to make the decision to approve RTP payload formats as 
WG items. Thus I like to have the necessary control that no drafts gets 
available as WG items before our explicit approval.

I would also like to point out that with automation the posting to the 
draft repository and sending of announcements could happen directly thus 
giving no time for the WG chair to stop the draft before it becomes 
available. I think it is more appropriate to have a delay in the initial 
submission of a WG document then to have wrongly published versions 
floating around. In comparison I think I have stopped one initial WG 
version submission and approved 4 or 5 so far this year. So it is not a 
massive workload.

If there is also a process where the WG chair can pre-approve WG drafts, 
it can work smoothly even before meetings or when the chair is on 
vacation. It then becomes a matter of the author to communicate with the 
WG chair if it really necessary to get it out ASAP. I hope such an 
interface would use a cut-off deadline based the submission, rather then 
the WG chairs approval. Although the chair should also have an deadline.

I think it is a great idea that the draft submission can be improved to 
be more reliable and quicker. That way I would get less questions from 
my WG authors asking when they can expect their drafts to become available.

Another feature that I would like to see that does not seem to be in the 
draft is to specify which WG that will get announcement of the draft. I 
think there should be a easy way of specifying a small number of WG 
mailing lists as being recipients of announcement of a individual draft.

Cheers

Magnus Westerlund

AVT Chair
Multimedia Technologies, Ericsson Research EAB/TVA/A
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ericsson AB                | Phone +46 8 4048287
Torshamsgatan 23           | Fax   +46 8 7575550
S-164 80 Stockholm, Sweden | mailto: [email-masked]

---

From: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:10:08 -0700

I have no problem with having the WG chair approve submission of drafts. If
one chair is on vacation, then the co-chair can approve, and if there is
only one chair, then the AD can approve, since the time span is limited.

What I would like to see, however, is that individual drafts which are
submitted to a WG prior to becoming WG drafts are somehow indexed and
accessable under the WG name, especially if they are to be discussed at a
meeting. I usually download a bunch of individual drafts that I am intending
to read prior to IETF meetings. Unless the WG chair puts hot links into the
agenda (and not all WG chairs do), now what I must do is go to the Internet
Drafts web page and do a full text search for each draft, a timeconsuming
and tedious process.

Some may object to this because it lends a certain cachet to individual
drafts that they should not have, since they have not been officially
accepted by the WG. I tend to think that this is unlikely to be a problem,
since they will fall off the page at 6 months when they expire, and nobody
is likely to mistake an individual draft for a WG draft, since the file
names are different. They can also be treated differently in the way they
are linked into the WG page, for example, the user could have to click
through to a page where individual drafts are on, instead of having the
draft immediately accessable from the WG page, as the WG drafts are.

            jak

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 13:23:07 -0400

FWIW.

> I usually download a bunch of individual
> drafts that I am intending to read prior to IETF meetings.

In this day and age, it's pretty simple to just mirror the entire ID
directory. http://www.ietf.org/rsync-help.html

A mere 140MB (today).

> Unless the WG chair puts hot links into the agenda (and not all WG
> chairs do), now what I must do is go to the Internet Drafts web page
> and do a full text search for each draft, a timeconsuming and
> tedious process.

If you have the ID name in the email agenda on your laptop, and a copy
of the entire ID directory, searching/finding is pretty
straightforward.

> What I would like to see, however, is that individual drafts which
> are submitted to a WG prior to becoming WG drafts are somehow
> indexed and accessable under the WG name, especially if they are to
> be discussed at a meeting.

What more is needed if you have the agenda and a mirror?

Folk can (and do) also use the convention of draft-<author>-<wgname>-
to indicate what WG they think the document belongs to. Not sure that
having more than this really helps much.

Thomas

---

From: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 10:36:25 -0700

Thomas,

Your points explain why it is possible, with some moderate amount of effort,
to get drafts for meetings today, but not specifically why having a page
with drafts to be discussed at a meeting is not such a good idea. If
generating such page were automated would you see a downside to having such
a page?

I might note that IEEE and other standardization groups typically do have
Web repositories for documents that will be the topic of upcoming meetings,
distinct from their longer term document repositories. In the case of 3GPP2,
an FTP server is used (at least, that was the case several years ago).

            jak

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Thomas Narten" <[email-masked]>
To: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Magnus Westerlund" <[email-masked]>;
<[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>;
<[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 10:23 AM
Subject: Re: I-D submission tool draft

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 13:42:56 -0400

> to get drafts for meetings today,

IMO, the effort involved in what I described is less than the effor
you described, where you have to go to the IETF search engine on each
draft in advance to pull it down.  But we might quibble on the
relative efforts involved here. :-)

> but not specifically why having a page with drafts to be discussed
> at a meeting is not such a good idea. If generating such page were
> automated would you see a downside to having such a page?

Isn't that page simply the WG agenda, in which case it can be and is
maintained/managed by the WG chairs?

It's getting the secretariat/or ID submission tool involved in this
that I'm not fond of. I don't see the need to centralize this or
(effectively) require that all WGs do this.

Thomas

---

From: Ted Faber <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:10:03 -0700

> relative efforts involved here. :-)

FWIW, I do what Thomas has advocated - rsync RFCs and I-Ds before the
meeting - and look for things with ls.  It works very well, even for
groups I attend on the spur of the moment, and is dirt simple.

-- 
Ted Faber
http://www.isi.edu/~faber           PGP: http://www.isi.edu/~faber/pubkeys.asc
Unexpected attachment on this mail? See http://www.isi.edu/~faber/FAQ.html#SIG

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 21:34:08 +0200

Hi James,

> Drafts web page and do a full text search for each draft, a timeconsuming

If I understand you correctly, you would be as well served if some
other method of providing hot links from workgroup agendas were provided.

I got frustrated some time ago at the lack of hot links, and set up a 
massaged IETF agenda pointing to workgroup agendas which also had been
massaged to make all draft-...... and rfc.... words into links, e.g.:

http://ietf.levkowetz.com/rfcmarkup.cgi?url=http://www.ietf.org/ietf/04aug/v6ops.txt

Would something like this serve, if provided through the regular meeting
agenda?

	Henrik

---

From: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 13:39:54 -0700

Yes, this would be exactly what is needed.

            jak

---

From: "Olaf M. Kolkman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:55:29 +0200

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 10:36:25 -0700
"James Kempf" <[email-masked]> wrote:

>  but not specifically why having a page

Yes. Setting the agenda is a human's job, more specifically the
chair's job. That human ought to have at least read and understood the
abstract (if not the whole draft) and group discussion items and set
the times. Let's not automate that.

I am all for having "hot" links in the agenda as published on the
IETF site. That would help the participants. 

For people that tend to prepare themselves in networkless places such
as planes hot links are not of that much use. But then again they
probably do an rsync.

--Olaf

---------------------------------| Olaf M. Kolkman
---------------------------------| RIPE NCC