Subject: Restatement of my proposal from last night's plenary

From: Charlie Perkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 07:19:29 -0800

Hello folks,

I realzed that my proposal probably wasn't clearly enough stated,
so here goes again.

It is my belief that the IESG has formulated some architectural
principles and applied them at inappropriate times in the process
of standardizing a working group protocol specification.  Right now,
there is nothing preventing such a thing from happening even after
working group Last Call, and nothing that assures that one AD's
architecture principal is shared by the rest of the IESG or the IAB.
This leads to what could be perceived as arbitrary restriction based
on somebody's pet peeve -- whether or not the perception is true.

I think that such architectural principles (e.g., suitability of
vendor-specific extensions, but there are a number of others)
should be formulated by the IAB.

I think the IESG should try to understand early in the process
whether a working group is violating an architectural principle, and
when some candidate proposal seems to be in violation, that the
IESG should get the IAB's opinion in writing.  That opinion should
be subjected to normal IETF process and published as a standards
track document which can be cited as a normative reference.

Again, as I stated last night, nothing is black and white, and I do
not claim that we need IAB statements on every aspect of protocol
design.  But there have been some major upsets lately, and that is
even less appropriate.  There has to be a happier medium.

Regards,
Charlie P.

---

From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 10:50:08 -0500

I must disagree.
If a working group is chartered, starts down a path, and then later the 
IESG or IAB determine that the working group has overlooked a serious 
architectural problem, then the IAB or IESG needs to raise the issue when 
they find it.  Declaring that "it is too late" in response to a real 
problem seem to be the wrong response.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

---

From: Charlie Perkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 08:16:03 -0800

Hello Joel,

Indeed, if a serious violation of an architectural principal survives
past working group Last Call, it is the IESG's responsibility to
get the working group to fix the problem.

But their prior responsibility was to make it well known to the
working group that an architectural violation was in progress,
and I am suggesting that the IAB must take some responsibility
for clearly formulating the principles so that the working groups
can avoid the violations.

I am not saying this is a black and white issue.

Regards,
Charlie P.

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 15:42:08 -0600

Charlie,

Thursday, November 21, 2002, 9:19:29 AM, you wrote:
Charlie> there is nothing preventing such a thing from happening even after
Charlie> working group Last Call, and nothing that assures that one AD's
Charlie> architecture principal is shared by the rest of the IESG or the IAB.
...
Charlie> I think the IESG should try to understand early in the process
...
Charlie> Again, as I stated last night, nothing is black and white, and I do
Charlie> not claim that we need IAB statements on every aspect of protocol
Charlie> design.

I've quoted 3 separate parts of your note. You state a problem,
suggest the need both for documentation of principles and early
analysis of WG efforts, and then end with an acknowledgement that none
of this is simple or straightforward.

You are correct on all 3 points.

We DO need serious quality control efforts and sometimes quite a lot
of them. But we need them to be consistent and we need most of them to
be early, before a working group wastes many person-months of effort.

There is no magic bullet, no single, simple action to make things work
better. But we need to start making some changes immediately. If folks
have not yet read draft-huston-ietf-pact-00, they should read it now.

d/
-- 
 Dave <mailto:[email-masked]>
 Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
 t +1.408.246.8253; f +1.408.850.1850

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 14:35:20 +0100

Dave Crocker wrote:
...
> If folks

If you think that mechanistic rules will improve quality, then yes,
do read it.

A remark I wanted to make last night is that a fair number of the
phenomena that people don't like (such as noticing a problem late)
are pretty much inevitable and in the "deal with it" class. Mechanistic
rules won't help. A less complicated world would help, but that option
isn't avaialable.

I do strongly agree on the need for delegation, but that delegates
responsibility and liability, not just the fun of reading 2000
pages of drafts. So it's easily said, but not easily done.

    Brian