Subject: RE: Mangled Internet-Drafts

From: Eric Burger <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 07:28:50 -0500

As someone who travels *a lot*, and often has spotty connectivity, I would
strongly urge a SMTP Submit mechanism to parallel a web-based tool.  For
example, one could have a standard format for the metadata entered in the
first two pages (XML? 822-style keyword-value?) followed by the document.  A
reply stating the submission succeeded or failed would be good.

One thing that made e-mail a killer application is its asynchronous
communication nature.  Sure, IM (in this case, a web page) is great, but it
isn't everything...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Henrik Levkowetz [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2004 7:15 PM
> To: Rohan Mahy
> Cc: WG Chairs; Tools Team Discussion
> Subject: Re: Mangled Internet-Drafts
> 
> 
> Hi Rohan,
> 
>     The tools team has been working on specifying such a web 
> interface.
> Maybe you'd like to review the draft:
> 
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-tools-draft-sub
mission-06.txt

	Henrik

Rohan Mahy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> My proposal is to use a web form to submit internet-drafts instead of an 
> email.  The form can automatically check for appropriate formatting, 
> boilerplate, and other ID nits, and return an immediate response 
> indicating the success or failure of the submission. The form could also 
> optionally check for WG chair approval for new WG IDs.  The drafts that 
> pass the pre-check could be automatically included in the repository, or 
> quarantined for inspection and release by the secretariat staff.
> 
> I realize that this approach has been discussed before and rejected for 
> historical reasons.  I do not intend to start a debate on the merits of 
> using web pages instead of email, merely to publicly indicate my support 
> for the approach.
> 
> thanks,
> -rohan

---

From: "Alex Rousskov" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 09:18:25 -0700

FYI: The Toolset proposed in  
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-tools-draft-submission-06.txt  
includes both email and web interfaces.

Alex.

On Wed, 2004/11/03 (MST), <[email-masked]> wrote:

> As someone who travels *a lot*, and often has spotty connectivity, I  
> would strongly urge a SMTP Submit mechanism to parallel a web-based tool.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tools-discuss mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tools-discuss

---

From: Paul Hoffman / VPNC <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 08:23:47 -0800

At 7:28 AM -0500 11/3/04, Eric Burger wrote:
>strongly urge a SMTP Submit mechanism to parallel a web-based tool.

At some point in your travelling, you must have internet connectivity 
to send/receive mail. You should be able to do a web form-submit at 
that time. True, you cannot queue these up as easily as you can your 
outgoing email, but you still can do it.

Designing two parallel systems is much more error-prone than designing one.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---

From: "Alex Rousskov" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 10:27:35 -0700

On Wed, 2004/11/03 (MST), <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> would
> At some point in your travelling, you must have internet connectivity to  
> send/receive mail. You should be able to do a web form-submit at that  
> time. True, you cannot queue these up as easily as you can your outgoing  
> email, but you still can do it.
>

I am not a big fan of multiple interfaces in early Toolset versions.  
Moreover, email draft submission has serious drawbacks (documented in  
Tools draft). However, given the large number of IETFers that have a very  
strong preference for using email for draft submission, the Tools team  
felt that we have to provide that option in order to get the tool  
"approved" by IETF.

Unless we have misjudged IETF feelings, it looks like every major IETF  
tool would have to have an email interface if such interface is  
technically possible. Perhaps we should place scary-looking ASCII-drawn  
wolves in our signatures to convince IETFers to stay away from email draft  
submissions? :-)

Alex.

---

From: Paul Hoffman / VPNC <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 09:50:02 -0800

At 10:27 AM -0700 11/3/04, Alex Rousskov wrote:
>Moreover, email draft submission has serious drawbacks (documented 
>in Tools draft). However, given the large number of IETFers that 
>have a very strong preference for using email for draft submission, 
>the Tools team felt that we have to provide that option in order to 
>get the tool "approved" by IETF.

<sigh> Probably right, although I think it is more due to inertia 
than to good engineering thinking.

>Unless we have misjudged IETF feelings, it looks like every major 
>IETF tool would have to have an email interface if such interface is 
>technically possible. Perhaps we should place scary-looking 
>ASCII-drawn wolves in our signatures to convince IETFers to stay 
>away from email draft submissions? :-)

The mail-based tool is possible, it is just much harder to get right 
in all cases because the draft can get mangled before it hits the 
Secretariat's mail server. Once the message is at the Secretariat, 
there is no problem; there are plenty of Perl (and so on) tools that 
can extract the I-D just fine.

Instead of trying to scare people away from mail submission, there 
might just be some mail feedback that says "Please check your draft 
for formatting after it is published. If the formatting is incorrect, 
submit a revised draft (after bumping the -nn number) through the web 
interface, and use the web interface in the future."

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---

From: "Alex Rousskov" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 11:09:34 -0700

On Wed, 2004/11/03 (MST), <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I think it is more due to inertia than to good engineering thinking.

Agreed.

  Instead of trying to scare people away from mail submission, there might
> just be some mail feedback that says "Please check your draft for  
> formatting after it is published. If the formatting is incorrect, submit  
> a revised draft (after bumping the -nn number) through the web  

Email submissions are validated just like web submissions. There is even a  
preview provided in the submission response. I suspect that the vast  
majority of formatting errors caused by email agents can be detected  
automatically, and many cases are already checked for by Henrik's idnits  
tool. Some formatting errors will prevent the draft from being posted and  
some will just generate a warning, but even a warning should be sufficient  
for most submitters to get worried and check what has actually happened.

Alex.