Subject: [newtrk] Session chair summary - ISD/SRD/Metadocument discussion

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 13:22:47 +0200

My sense of the room wrt ISD/SRD/Metadocument:

- These can potentially be useful (a few dissenters)

- These need to be approved by someone, not "just written". So they need a 
process for generating and approving them.

- Some text is needed in the documents - the smallest thing needed is to 
describe what technology it tries to cover.

- It's likely that "less is more" - the SRD initial description sounds less 
likely to generate controversy (and therefore work) than the ISD initial 
description.

- Introducing this type of document should be done via an experiment with 
"willing users" - something on the order of the PROTO experience.

Note: These are not my opinions (even though I think they represent a 
viable way forward). It is what I think the opinion of the room was. But 
I'll take full responsibility for the formulations.

Comments? Differing opinions?

                   Harald

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From: Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:27:48 -0500

Dear Harald,

Well, since you asked...

Maybe the room didn't have a sense on this point, but as we worked 
through comparing ISDs to what we thought SRDs might be (submitted draft 
= good, but that's water under the bridge), one of the distinctions that 
we seemed to gloss over kind of quickly was the part where ISDs were 
going to be reasoned text, and SRDs were going to be mechanical extracts 
of existing text that has already been reviewed.

If I understood the SRD proposal as it was being discussed, this seems 
to be the distinction between what actually goes in the SRD and what 
goes into the database that the SRD points to.

Someone (Harald?) said we are only likely to do one of [ISD, SRD], but 
I'd like to better understand what we're choosing between. I'll wait for 
an SRD I-D before commenting further.

Someone (Doug?) mentioned the point about metadocuments getting out of 
sync with the documents they point to (for example, if we come out with 
5821/5822 on e-mail in a couple of years, how quickly would we expect 
ISD/SRD "Internet Mail" to point to the new RFCs?).

Otherwise, Harald's summary looks like I room I was sitting in (thanks, 
Harald, for summarizing).

Spencer

Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:

> - These need to be approved by someone, not "just written". So they 
> need a process for generating and approving them.
>
> - Some text is needed in the documents - the smallest thing needed is 
> to describe what technology it tries to cover.
>
> - It's likely that "less is more" - the SRD initial description sounds 
> less likely to generate controversy (and therefore work) than the ISD 
> initial description.
>
> - Introducing this type of document should be done via an experiment 
> with "willing users" - something on the order of the PROTO experience.
>
> viable way forward). It is what I think the opinion of the room was. 
> But I'll take full responsibility for the formulations.
>

.

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From: Douglas Otis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 08:10:57 -0700

> goes into the database that the SRD points to.

Actually, the Status database would be independent of the SRD proposal,
but seems like a natural extension.  I will need to write a draft better
describing the Status database.  Within the SRD document itself, there
is virtually no language beyond a sentence permitted to describe the
endeavour being covered.  Outside of this, the rest is meta-links broken
down into relational classifications.

> an SRD I-D before commenting further.

There is already a -00 version.  

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-otis-newtrk-rfc-set-00.txt

This draft needs a fair amount of clean up.  John Leslie has offered to
help with the next version.  I hope to have that out in about a week,
depending upon what John finds.  My intent is to make this bare-bones by
getting rid of the HTML and RSS examples.  I will adopt an XML name
rather than Marshall Rose's escape mechanism, which was needed to
simplify the writing of RFCs but not really needed here. This will
permit better syntax checking by the editor, before submitting the
document to other script.

> ISD/SRD "Internet Mail" to point to the new RFCs?).

Yes, that was one concern.  The other was the ISD may become the vehicle
for making changes, rather than dealing with both the ISD and RFC
documents.

-Doug

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From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 16:40:50 +0200

--On 10. august 2005 09:27 -0500 Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> = good, but that's water under the bridge),

draft-otis-newtrk-rfc-set-00

> one of the distinctions that

Apart from the introduction, yes. See draft.

> If I understood the SRD proposal as it was being discussed, this seems to
> be the distinction between what actually goes in the SRD and what goes
> into the database that the SRD points to.
>

If *Ds are a success, I would expect "at RFC approval time"..... if they 
continue to be voluntary "extras", anybody's guess.

.

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 11:28:22 +0200

BTW I put Douglas's example SRD on the web during the
session. In case you weren't on jabber at the time, here's
the URL. The "status" link is bogus. I inserted a blank in the
URL to keep Google off it when this hits the archive.

http://www. geocities.com/be1carpenter/smtpSRD.html

    Brian

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