Subject: Re: More thoughts on the Proto process

From: Mark Allman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2007 15:23:03 -0400

> 5. Working out who the shepherd is for an I-D

Somehow these sorts of problems of who needs to see comments are always
a mundane and frustrating task that I never seem to get right.  I wonder
if it is possible to get aliases generated automatically at least for WG
drafts like:

  draft-ietf-tcpm-document-whatever-authors@something
  draft-ietf-tcpm-document-whatever-all@something

where the first just includes the authors and the second would include
the appropriate chairs and the ADs (using the general aliases for those
folks since they change).

It is a seemingly simple enough task, but such aliases would make my
life better.  (I know, I know .... put my scripting where my mouth is
....) 

allman

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:22:15 +0200

Hi Mark,

> life better.  (I know, I know .... put my scripting where my mouth is

Only a couple of days ago, I set up aliases very similar to
the above on the tools.ietf.org mail servers.  The current aliases
have the form

	[email-masked]

and is an alias for the email addresses of the document authors.

Since I'm also maintaining aliases of the form

	[email-masked]
	[email-masked]

(which I think is what you refer to as the general aliases above)
this lets you mix-and-match as needed, without having to remember
whether the -all form you mention above includes or excludes the
ads, and without me having to set up yet another alias list or
two ;-)

Does this work for you?

	Henrik

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:34:44 +0200

On 2007-04-10 14:22 Henrik Levkowetz said the following:
...
> and is an alias for the email addresses of the document authors.

PS:  I should note that since the secretariat doesn't maintain a list
of all authors of all drafts currently, what made it possible for
me to set up the draft alias lists at all is Jari Arkko's 'getauthors'
tool (http://www.arkko.com/tools/getauthors.html) which extracts author
information directly from the drafts.

	Henrik

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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:33:59 +0300

> information directly from the drafts.
And I should mention that while this tool works most of the time, it is
not 100% reliable. Why? Because it attempts to read free form text
written by humans. There are a few active drafts that do not contain
e-mail address information, for instance. There are some drafts
where the tool may miss some authors, too, or be mistaken about
who is an author.

So please consider the new addresses as an experiment for the
moment, until the draft submission process ensures that the
metadata is always right. We are interested in the feedback,
however, if something either works or doesn't work for you.

Henrik -- what do you do if you have no data from getauthors? Send
an error back to the sender of the e-mail? Or use only the address entered
by the secretariat?

Jari

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:39:44 +0200

> an error back to the sender of the e-mail? Or use only the address entered

Currently, if there is no recognizable email returned by getauthors,
but there is an email address available from the secretariat, that
will be used.  Otherwise, there will not be an alias set up for the
draft in question, so mails to that alias will be returned to the sender
as non-deliverable.

	Henrik

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From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:46:19 -0400

On Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:33:59 +0300
Jari Arkko <[email-masked]> wrote:

> >   
> And I should mention that while this tool works most of the time, it
> is not 100% reliable. Why? Because it attempts to read free form text
Gee -- it should process xml drafts...

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:50:35 +0200

Hi Steve,

on 2007-04-10 17:46 Steven M. Bellovin said the following:
...
> Gee -- it should process xml drafts...

True to some degree, but at this moment in time, there are some
problems with that ,;-) :

  * We mostly don't have the xml version of the drafts available.
    This will hopefully change when the Draft Submission tool
    comes online, as it will accept .xml source as well as .txt
    and other formats.

  * Already now, getauthors works very well with drafts produced
    with xml2rfc; it's the drafts _not_ produced from an xml
    source which are problematic, and for those we won't get any
    xml source any time soon...

Anyway, even without xml sources, the Draft Submission tool has
been designed to solicit names and email addresses for all the
authors, so that even if that information can't be found in the
draft, we should have an alternative source for that information
soon :-)

	Henrik