Subject: Re: [newtrk] WGS as a WG-defined label

From: [email-masked] (Scott Bradner)
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 21:30:19 -0500 (EST)

> I am not sure how how to interpret the above. RFC 2418 seem to define
> Working Group Last Call as the final step before submitting the draft
> to IESG for publication.

a WG last call can be used at any time a WG chair wants to see if there
are open issues or if the WG as reached consensus - one place a WG
last call can be used is to see if there is consensus to see if a 
document is ready to be submitted to the IESG but there is nothing
to limit the idea of a WG last call to just that use

Scott

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From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 21:06:35 -0600

My apologies for a confusing sentence in the current draft - the
intent was that the WG do a concensus call, which might, or might not,
be a WG Last Call, to declare a WGS. We seem to use "WG Last Call" and
"WG consensus call" interchangeably (based on Scott's note), and the
current draft says "WG Last Call", but we intended this in the generic
sense ("WG consensus call").

Thanks to Alex for asking about this, and to Scott for the feedback.

Spencer

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott Bradner" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2004 8:30 PM
Subject: Re: [newtrk] WGS as a WG-defined label

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From: Alex Rousskov <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 22:02:08 -0700 (MST)

Spencer,

	Glad my interpretation of the intent was accurate!

So, it looks like WGS is actually a WG-approved "State of this Draft"
section in an Internet Draft. The section may not apply to the entire
draft and may contain multiple statements about the draft state.
Specific state description/wording and its interpretation is the WG
responsibility. Drafts with such sections are labeled "WGS drafts".

Thus, the proposed label addresses two problems:

	1) We are acknowledging the problem that some [portions of]
	   WG drafts may not be WG-approved when published, and WGS is
	   a solution to say that some [portions of] WG drafts
	   were WG-approved when published.

	2) We are marking a subset of WG drafts as ``drafts with
	   some kind of a "State of this Draft" statement/section''.
	   Interested parties can read those sections to know what
	   actions (e.g., review or implementation) are appropriate
	   for the draft in question.

	N.B. For some reason, we also give drafts with WGS drafts
	portions longer expiration times as if WG consensus regarding
	the State section is a rare form of achievement.

I wonder if (1) has a more direct solution and (2) should be something
that every WG draft MUST have?

Finally, can we do any better than ``some kind of a "State of this
Draft" statement/section''. Or is the situation so hopeless that any
specific/standardized set of states (e.g., Review Ready, Prototype
Ready, etc.) will do more harm than good? Why it is OK for the WG to
say "Review Ready" but not OK for IETF to document a standard "Review
Ready" label (among other useful/common labels)? Are we expecting
dozens of Review Ready flavors? Is same-but-different labels is
something we should discourage and allow only as exceptions instead?
Kind of reminds me of MUST/SHOULD/MAY keywords and lack of thereof.

Thanks,

Alex.

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From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 06:17:23 -0600

9 months for WGS is actually orthogonal to the rest of the proposal -
I came up with this, with the intent of giving people two full IETF
cycles between revisions if they need to use all that time.

We didn't intend to have a different expiration period for WGS,
compared to other I-Ds - we actually did say this in
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-dawkins-newtrk-wgs-00.txt:

      COMMENT:  It is worth considering extending the I-D time-
               limit to 9 months. This will be more convenient
               for WGS documents -- for example, it provides two
               full IETF meeting cycles -- and will have no
               substantive effect on other I-Ds.

But if this is noise for you, please (tell us and) ignore it for now -
we don't really care whether WGS has the same lifetime as any other
I-D that expires in six months, or has the same lifetime as any other
I-D that expires in nine months.

Thanks for asking,

Spencer

From: "Alex Rousskov" <[email-masked]>
To: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2004 11:02 PM
Subject: Re: [newtrk] WGS as a WG-defined label

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From: Alex Rousskov <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 09:52:58 -0700 (MST)

Spencer,

	Thanks for correcting my misunderstanding!

	As for whether longer expiration period idea is noise, I
cannot answer: I believe that the whole idea of deleting IDs from
public IETF servers is based on assumptions that are not longer true
(and, hopefully, never will be). Thus, I am probably the wrong person
to ask; my answer will always be that old documents must be publicly
archived. When all documents are publicly archived, specific default
expiration time becomes the wrong/meaningless question because
information in the IDs, by its nature, "expires" (i.e., can be
changed) immediately (by default).

	Thus, I would not spend the energy on extending expiration
periods of IDs. I would try to bring document preservation policy in
sync with reality instead.

Thanks,

Alex.

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From: "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 10:28:11 -0800

Expiring I-Ds, IMO, has little to do with making them unavailable.
Expired I-Ds have been and will always be widely available.
Expiring I-Ds has more to do with indicating what is currently be
actively worked by the IETF and other parties.

An I-D which had no updates made to it in 6-months should
either have been progressed (which, BTW, keeps it from being
deleted out of the repository) or it should be viewed as not
actively being worked (and, hence, be deleted out of the
repository of actively worked I-Ds).

I would be generally opposed to increasing the expiration time
of I-D as that would tend to give more false impressions that
an I-D is being actively worked when it wasn't.

Kurt

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From: Alex Rousskov <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 11:47:47 -0700 (MST)

> Expired I-Ds have been and will always be widely available.

Agreed.

> actively worked by the IETF and other parties.

Yes, and to be more precise, "expiration" date we publish today means
next to nothing. The document status (ID), the creation date, and
availability of more recent versions of the document mean a lot.
Drafts "expire" because they are being replaced by newer draft
versions and/or because their ideas expire.

Thus, ID expiration timestamp is virtually always incorrect or
meaningless. WGS may have a meaningful expiration timestamp (e.g., "we
promise to publish no changes for 30 days to make sure all reviews are
in sync"), but that is a different story.

Alex.
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From: "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 13:05:01 -0800

At 10:47 AM 3/29/2004, Alex Rousskov wrote:
>next to nothing.

While one should be careful not to read too much into the
expiration date included in the I-D (just as they should be
careful not to read too much into the name of the I-D), the
fact that I-Ds do expire has quite significant and important
meaning to our engineering and publication processes.

It is also important that I-Ds automatically expire as it
unlikely we would manually expire non-active I-Ds in a timely
manner.  6-month auto-expiration of I-Ds seems quite reasonable.

I disagree with the sediment expressed in the proposal that
a longer period would have "no substantive effect on other I-Ds".
It will have a direct impact on other I-Ds and IETF processes.
It effectively means it okay to wait 2 meeting cycles instead
of 1 to update an I-D.  That will likely cause the pace of
engineering to slow significantly.  It could also be argued
that a slower pace of engineering may have a negative impact on
the quality of the effort.

Anyways, I hope the value of a WGS is not tied to the
auto-expiration period of an I-D.  That is, I hope changes
to this period can be declared beyond the scope of newtrk.

Kurt 

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From: Alex Rousskov <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 14:42:39 -0700 (MST)

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote:

> While one should be careful not to read too much into the expiration
> date included in the I-D (just as they should be careful not to read
> too much into the name of the I-D), the fact that I-Ds do expire has
> quite significant and important meaning to our engineering and
> publication processes.

What is the quite significant and important meaning of draft
expiration to IETF engineering process?

> It is also important that I-Ds automatically expire as it unlikely
> we would manually expire non-active I-Ds in a timely manner.

If published expiration date has no significant meaning, then manual
or automatic expiration of drafts is simply a waste of resources (a
meaningless action) creating a burden for those who look for old
drafts.

> I disagree with the sediment expressed in the proposal that a longer
> period would have "no substantive effect on other I-Ds". It will
> have a direct impact on other I-Ds and IETF processes. It
> effectively means it okay to wait 2 meeting cycles instead of 1 to
> update an I-D.

AFAIK, one does not need to meaningfully update an ID to republish it
with a new version number and to restart the expiration timer. And
such non-updates do happen, exactly because the expiration
date/mechanism is a meaningless annoyance!

Alex.

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From: "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 15:21:41 -0800

>expiration to IETF engineering process?

A draft which is expired is generally considered not to be actively
pursued by its authors (or, in the case of a WG draft, the WG).  I
would hope it would be obvious to all why it is important to be able
to distinguish those I-Ds which are actively pursued from those
which are not.  If it is not obvious to you, oh well.

Kurt 

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From: Alex Rousskov <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 16:49:37 -0700 (MST)

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004, Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote:

> pursued by its authors (or, in the case of a WG draft, the WG).

Correct. This inactivity may mean several quite different things and
does not necessarily imply outdated ideas or poor draft quality.

> I would hope it would be obvious to all why it is important to be
> able to distinguish those I-Ds which are actively pursued from those
> which are not.

IMHO, it is not the amount of current activity that is important, in
general. It is the quality of the draft and relevance of its ideas
that determine the actual lifespan of the draft. Fighting that natural
lifespan with artificial expiration dates is counterproductive,
especially when we cannot enforce those artificial restrictions.

IETF processes were designed with an intent that the status of a
document reflects its quality and stability, but that intent does not
always materialize (for many reasons). The fact that we have protocols
that were successfully and widely implemented and deployed based on
long-expired drafts is a case in point.

The NEWTRK goal, IMHO, should be to adjust the standards process so
that it follows the natural lifespan of an idea/protocol rather than
attempting to shape that lifespan via artificial restrictions we
cannot even enforce.

Alex.
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