Subject: A new state in the stream of IETF States ?

From: Martin Vigoureux <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2013 11:23:38 +0200

Hello,

I have the impression that we miss an extra state as part of the IETF 
States we use in the data-tracker to manage documents:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/help/state/draft/stream-ietf/

The states enable to reflect a poll for adoption and to then manage 
documents which have been adopted as working group documents (either 
park/dead or up to publication)
However, I find it difficult to reflect, by using the currently defined 
states, the situation where a document has been polled for adoption but 
for which the conclusion is that it is not adopted as is to become a WG 
document.

I believe this is an important information to track.

We could use the Park/Dead states with a comment to reflect that 
situation, but that does not truly match and on top of that, these 
states, as currently defined, are for WG Documents, while a non adopted 
I-D, is by definition not a WG Document.

The I-D might be revised in order to reach consensus some time in the 
future, but that might take some time and until it gets polled a second 
time it will stay in the "Call For Adoption By WG Issued" state which is 
a bit odd.

The authors might even decide not to pursue the idea and so the I-D will 
expire and will thus stay indefinitely in the "Call For Adoption By WG 
Issued" state.

The chairs could decide to pull it off the IETF Stream and so put it 
back in the pool of not tracked individual I-Ds, but this is anyway not 
possible currently, and I personally do not think it would be a good 
idea as we would loose track of an important information at the WG level.

I thus think that adding a new state to reflect the (potentially 
temporary) situation where a group has decided not to adopt as is an 
individual I-D, would have some value.

Thoughts?

Thanks

-m

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From: "Romascanu, Dan (Dan)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2013 09:30:39 +0000

I agree with Martin that this would be useful. 

Regards,

Dan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On
> Behalf Of Martin Vigoureux
> Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2013 12:24 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: Henrik Levkowetz
> Subject: A new state in the stream of IETF States ?
> 
> Hello,
> 
> park/dead or up to publication) However, I find it difficult to reflect,
> by using the currently defined states, the situation where a document
> has been polled for adoption but for which the conclusion is that it is
> not adopted as is to become a WG document.
>

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 11:45:42 +0200

Hi Martin,

A suggestion inline:

> idea as we would loose track of an important information at the WG level.

I would suggest that we add an annotation tag (which can actually stay as
long as desired, even across state changes) that provides the information
that this document has been polled for adoption but not adopted, and pull
the document off the IETF stream again.  We need to make that possible.

If we add another 'not adopted' state, without putting the document back
in the individual document state, it will complicate future handling of the
document; we may have to add multiple code paths and multiple search terms
for what should actually be shown as an individual document.  Setting a
tag on the document lets us put it in the right state without loosing
history.

> individual I-D, would have some value.

See above :-)

Best regards,

	Henrik

---

From: Loa Andersson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 18:29:19 +0800

Henrik,

If we are in "Candidate" state and start the wg poll and go into "Poll
for Adoption" state, but the result is that the document still belongs
to the working group but was not accepted as a wg doc, where do we place
it? Back to "ID Exists", well no because then all info is lost and
someone else can grab the document. To "Candidate", well I think Martin
says that he loses info if i does so. Right Martin?

Personally I think tags are more a pain than a help just now, when I
still new to this, I basically uses just one tag "New ID needed".

/Loa

-- 

Loa Andersson                        email: [email-masked]
Senior MPLS Expert                          [email-masked]
Huawei Technologies (consultant)     phone: +46 739 81 21 64

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 12:42:35 +0200

Hi Loa,

> says that he loses info if i does so. Right Martin?

Then you fail to see the point of tags.  The difference between tags and
states is simply that multiple tags can be attached at the same time, while
you can never have more than one state at the same time, for a given state
machine.

Having a "Polled for adoption but not adopted" tag would give you full
freedom of placing the document in the appropriate state (no WG state,
back to individual stream, or stay in "Candidate") and by having the
tag, you wouldn't loose information.

Now, if the tools for handling tags are insufficient or badly implemented,
that's something we can work at fixing.  But if you want to avoid loosing
information when placing a document in a new state, tags are exactly what
you need.

Best regards,

	Henrik

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From: Loa Andersson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 19:15:07 +0800

Henrik,

Yes I guess you are right - I kind of fail to see the point of the tags,
I'm my mind they are to restrictive. I tend to use "Other" + comment,
if it is not "Revised ID needed".

/Loa

--

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From: Martin Vigoureux <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2013 15:26:51 +0200

Henrik, Loa,

either option is fine for me.
Not knowing the code behind it is difficult for me to apprehend the 
complexity but I trust you Henrik on this.
I had a small preference for a new state, but the option to both create 
a new Tag and give the capability to remove a draft from the IETF stream 
seems to be more flexible.

However, that leads to two extra requirements
1/ The capability for I-Ds not to loose their tags when being taken out 
the IETF stream. This appears to me as an important change, because it 
looks to me that only IETF Stream I-Ds can be tagged today.
2/ The capability to see both the tag and state (as opposed to only the 
state today) for each document when looking at the home page of a WG.
Note that this is different from the ticket (#1138) you recently created.

regards,
-m

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From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2013 10:09:51 -0400

This was actually discussed at length when the WG state map was
developed (there were a couple of BoFs about it, and mailing list
discussion).  We decided specifically NOT to have a state such as what
you're suggesting, and decided that "Dead" or "Parked" would be used
for this, depending upon whether the conclusion was final or whether
there was still discussion and it might again be called for adoption
later.

One issue that came up in the discussion was "working group shopping",
wherein people bring their document to one WG after another, hoping
that one of them will take it.  Tags can help warn us against that, by
recording, along with the "Dead" state, which WGs have considered it
and said no.

Barry

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From: Loa Andersson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 22:20:35 +0800

Barry,

I think what you say is fine when it is a document that a wg finally
decided *not* to adopt, but I guess the situation Martin is looking
at is that when the wg runs a poll and the result is undecided (e.g.
there are things that needs to be done to the draft before it can
be ACKed or NAKed)

/Loa

--

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From: Martin Vigoureux <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2013 16:23:30 +0200

Barry,

thanks. As you have read, Park/Dead is indeed a possibility I envisaged. 
But to be rigorous, I think that these states descriptions should be 
modified to match with the situation I describe because these states 
both explicitly refer to WG Documents.

-m