Subject: RE: I-D submission tool draft

From: "Jari Arkko (JO/LMF)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:51:08 +0200

I like automation. I think it would be great if the
tools handled nits checking, file posting, IPR/copyright
confirmation and all that, probably getting the draft
to the web site in minutes. Compare this to the delay
we have now, which is days -- not bad compared to past
times but it would still speed up the process, let the
secretariat do other, more useful things. And it would
probably increase quality too, less accidents and more
formal checking during submission.

I think the tools should read things like author information
from the draft. People would hate typing all that in again.
But it may be fine for the tool to ask if the information
it has read is correct, as a confirmation. Or get a
confirmation that the user has read "Note well".

As for the chair approval part: when we automate processes,
we do not have to follow the current manual process, we
can do things in a different way if it makes sense. Just because
we can require a chair to sign off in the tool does not
mean that we should. In fact, in order to make things go
smoothly, I would propose that an optimistic security
mechanism be adopted as opposed to a prior or real-time
approval: give the chairs a function to remove a WG draft
if someone has fraudulently/erroneously submitted one.

A couple of detailed comments to the draft below:

- I don't think we want the cut & paste option. Upload
  is sufficient.

- I'm not sure the correct metadata & go to manual process
  option is useful. Is there some reason why we can't require
  either that (a) the draft be corrected so that the metadata
  can actually be read, or that (b) the user fills in the
  metadata and then we do the automatic publish operation
  anyway?

  I'd like to keep the e-mail based submission process
  as a backup, but I see no reason to add a new manual
  mode to the tool.

- "two versions are submitted with a suspiciously small gap?"
  I think this is a non-problem. Fortunately, some people
  may read your draft immediately, and notice a problem that
  you want to correct. Or, unfortunately, you yourself notice
  something that went wrong. I think we need to allow new versions
  even with a short time gap.

- I'd rather see the tool as one "submit page" rather than
  a separate "upload" and "check pages". You submit and then
  you get back the information that you want to verify, and
  then you either press OK or resubmit/correct.

- Security considerations and submitter authentication.
  Perhaps we should think about e-mail address verification,
  just to confirm that the web user is actually able to
  receive e-mail at the address he claims to have.

  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.

--Jari

---

From: Gorry Fairhurst <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:28:05 +0100

IMHO, The way people cite ID's (which we know they should not) leads to 
a conclusion that SOMEONE MUST check new WG submissions BEFORE they are 
allocated an draft-ietf-xxx- filename... That way, we prevent people 
archiving none-drafts.

I'd be keen to see WG (Chair) approval of EACH WG draft, afterall
authors in the proposed scheme can immediately publish
a revised individual submission identical to the WG proposal
--- This would also give Chairs time to check the details *AND* Author 
list. This may be a good time to check all Authors are ACTUALLY going to 
engage in developing this as a WG document and in the review, etc.

Gorry

Jari Arkko (JO/LMF) wrote:

<snip>

> if someone has fraudulently/erroneously submitted one.

<snip>