Subject: RE: MARID back from the grave?

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 14:33:24 +0900

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 21:13:53 -0800, Christian Huitema wrote:
>  At this point, we get the deadline effect: a
>
>  work that in reality is a revision has now to meet the "original
>  submission" deadline. That's not very fair. In these conditions, there
>  should be some kind of automatic exemption, maybe by allowing drafts to
>  use an N+1 version number.

well, happily these situations are pretty rare.  that means that we probably do not want to create extra procedures for the secretariat to have to mess with.

probably the cleanest thing would have been for us to generate new draft names, some time ago. but we really were trying to revise the specifications and it took exactly a week longer than i had hoped...

ultimately, my view is that an I-D is supposed to have no real status, so the I-D name is just a name.  having the name continue to use a field that refers to a defunct working is certainly a bit odd, but it's not as if it imparts special privilege to the document.  

It's just a name.

 d/
 --
 Dave Crocker
 Brandenburg InternetWorking
 +1.408.246.8253
 dcrocker  a t ...
 WE'VE MOVED to:  www.bbiw.net

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---

From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 21:13:53 -0800

> What is particularly ironic is that these I-Ds began as individual
> submissions and we were asked to bring them in, under Marid, just in
time
> for the working group to be disbanded.

We have seen that situation before, for example when the NGTRANS working
group was disbanded. Some of the work was picked up by a new working
group, but to start with a clean base all drafts had to be resubmitted
as individual contribution. At this point, we get the deadline effect: a
work that in reality is a revision has now to meet the "original
submission" deadline. That's not very fair. In these conditions, there
should be some kind of automatic exemption, maybe by allowing drafts to
use an N+1 version number. 

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 06:15:54 -0600

I'm not smart about the definition of "fair" in an IETF context, but 
it's also worth noting that

- as Steve Coya pointed out every IETF meeting for years during the WG 
chair training, there is NO linkage between what the filename is and 
whether it's a WG draft or not. The WG name is listed in a separate 
field in the database, and any draft with a WG name in that field, 
regardless of the file name, is listed on the WG charter page,

- every time we rename an individual draft when it becomes a WG draft, 
we make it harder to trace versions of the new draft back to versions 
of the old draft (I am a Gen-ART reviewer and usually look at previous 
versions of a draft at Last Call time, to see what's been changing),

- every time we rename a draft because it moves from one working group 
to another, we make it harfer to trace versions of the new draft back 
to versions of the old draft (ditto),

- the reason we rename individual drafts seems to be that there are so 
many drafts that a large number of participants base decisions to 
review a draft on whether they THINK that it's a WG draft - and 
there's no other information about whether a draft is a WG draft, 
except the filename, in the ID Announcement.

I should also point out that if you haven't looked at 
http://www.ietf.org/ID.html in the past month, it now includes a 
pointer to a "New Internet-Drafts Database Interface", so someone is 
being busy in this area currently...

Maybe we could improve the announcements to say what the WG (WGs?) are 
for a draft, and we could quit twisting in this self-inflicted wind?

Spencer

From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
To: "Dave Crocker" <[email-masked]>; "Harald Tveit Alvestrand" 
<[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 11:13 PM
Subject: RE: MARID back from the grave?

time
> for the working group to be disbanded.

We have seen that situation before, for example when the NGTRANS 
working
group was disbanded. Some of the work was picked up by a new working
group, but to start with a clean base all drafts had to be resubmitted
as individual contribution. At this point, we get the deadline effect: 
a
work that in reality is a revision has now to meet the "original
submission" deadline. That's not very fair. In these conditions, there
should be some kind of automatic exemption, maybe by allowing drafts 
to
use an N+1 version number.

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: Julien Laganier <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 14:57:02 +0100

Hi Spencer,

On Thursday 24 February 2005 13:15, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
>
> Maybe we could improve the announcements to say what the WG (WGs?)
> are for a draft, and we could quit twisting in this self-inflicted
> wind?

But isn't it already the case? Quoting I-D announce:

"A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts 
directories. This draft is a work item of the XXX Working Group of 
the IETF"

Thanks,

--julien

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 11:04:26 -0500

Spencer,

It seems to me that there is another issue here, one that is
quite real, happens fairly regularly, and that may call for some
rethinking down the line.

Suppose you post a draft, as draft-dawkins-foo-bar-00, as a
means of documenting an idea to see if a currently-operating WG
is interested in it.  The WG is, the Chair, conforming to
current practice, says "when you do a revision based on the
comments you have received, post it as
draft-ietf-MyWG-foo-bar-00".  

Now, in addition to the traceability issues you identify, there
is an additional issue that really has an impact on how we
function:  While the posting deadline for
draft-dawkins-foo-bar-01 is two weeks before the next IETF
meeting, the decision to post the same text as
draft-ietf-MyWG-foo-bar-00 instead requires that the decision to
do so must be made four weeks in advance of the meeting: while
the posting deadline for -00 drafts is three weeks before the
meeting, the secretariat seems to want an extra week for WG
Chair signoffs for WG-named drafts.  Especially when IETF
meetings come close together, a four-week decision point is not
a good way to get maximum value out of the time between meetings.

     john

--On Thursday, 24 February, 2005 06:15 -0600 Spencer Dawkins
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> I'm not smart about the definition of "fair" in an IETF
> context, but it's also worth noting that
> 
> - as Steve Coya pointed out every IETF meeting for years
> during the WG chair training, there is NO linkage between what
> the filename is and whether it's a WG draft or not. The WG
> name is listed in a separate field in the database, and any
> draft with a WG name in that field, regardless of the file
> name, is listed on the WG charter page,
> 
> - every time we rename an individual draft when it becomes a
> WG draft, we make it harder to trace versions of the new draft
> back to versions of the old draft (I am a Gen-ART reviewer and
>...

---

From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 13:23:02 -0500

> draft-ietf-MyWG-foo-bar-00".

It's entirely up to the chair whether to follow that practice or not. 
Personally, I think it's more useful to keep the existing filename for the 
life of the document, and that is the practice we have been following in 
the Kerberos WG since its creation (well before I became chair).  We have 
just had an RFC published from an I-D named as an individual submission, 
and the work item we're currently spending most of our cycles on is 
something we inherited from CAT which still has a draft-cat-* filename. 
Ironically, the only confusion I'm aware of is in the part of Henrik's 
excellent WG status pages, which don't recognize that these documents 
belong to us (I understand he's working on a way to fix that).

I agree with Spencer - a filename is just a filename, and shouldn't carry 
metadata.  It should not be used as the way to decide what WG a document 
belongs to, and it _also_ should not be used to decide whether a particular 
submission is "initial" or not for the purposes of deadlines -- a rename of 
an existing document should not require meeting the earlier deadline.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <[email-masked]>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 14:23:47 -0500

--On Thursday, 24 February, 2005 13:23 -0500 Jeffrey Hutzelman
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>...
> I agree with Spencer - a filename is just a filename, and
> shouldn't carry metadata.  It should not be used as the way to
> decide what WG a document belongs to, and it _also_ should not
> be used to decide whether a particular submission is "initial"
> or not for the purposes of deadlines -- a rename of an
> existing document should not require meeting the earlier
> deadline.

Perhaps that is just my point.  What we have managed to do to
ourselves is to decide that some filenames, but not others, do
carry metadata, and then have developed some rules around those
names and metadata that are, arguably, not good for the
standards process.

The notion that new documents were required to be posted a week
earlier than updated ones seemed like a good idea at the time
(and I bear some of the blame) because the secretariat was
spending much more processing, and rule-verification time on the
new ones than on the updates.  But then we introduced all of
this other baggage associated with metadata and semantics and,
at the same time, the secretariat stopped doing significant
checking of _documents_.  Whether your WG's strategy of just
leaving everything as a individually-named draft is a good
general principle or just an effective workaround for an
administrative problem, it seems to me that we shouldn't have
procedures that put significant barriers in the way of new WG
drafts.  As you put it, renaming an existing document, or
producing a closely-coupled revision of it, should not advance
the posting deadline from two weeks to a month.

    john

---

From: Tony Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 16:03:32 -0500

Of course, the rule about -00 drafts could be modified to allow them to 
be posted on the followup date IF and ONLY IF they are now a WG draft 
AND they've been previously published as an individual submission.

	Tony Hansen
	[email-masked]

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 17:43:18 -0500

--On Thursday, 24 February, 2005 16:03 -0500 Tony Hansen
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Of course, the rule about -00 drafts could be modified to
> allow them to be posted on the followup date IF and ONLY IF
> they are now a WG draft AND they've been previously published
> as an individual submission.

Of course, and it would be an excellent solution, IMO, assuming
that the IESG and Secretariat could agree to and deal with a
rule that is that complicated.  And that would also require
moving the WG Chair approval date for such drafts much closer to
IETF than four weeks out.

    john

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 23:55:20 +0100

on 2005-02-24 7:23 pm Jeffrey Hutzelman said the following:
[...]
> belong to us (I understand he's working on a way to fix that).

Fixed as of today for active drafts.  Unfortunately, this is based on
the information in 1id-index.txt, which only gives the draft -> WG
association for active drafts.  Currently I don't have any good source
of draft -> WG associations for published, replaced or expired drafts.

One consequence of this is that the draft-ietf-cat-* document you refer
to is visible on the krb-wg draft status page now, but the published
individual submission is not.

(I haven't given up on rectifying this, too, but it isn't on the top of
the list currently.)

	Henrik

---

From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 18:42:06 -0500

On Thursday, February 24, 2005 11:55:20 PM +0100 Henrik Levkowetz 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> Personally, I think it's more useful to keep the existing filename for
>> the  life of the document, and that is the practice we have been
>> following in  the Kerberos WG since its creation (well before I became
>> chair).  We have  just had an RFC published from an I-D named as an
>> individual submission,  and the work item we're currently spending most
>> of our cycles on is  something we inherited from CAT which still has a
>> draft-cat-* filename.  Ironically, the only confusion I'm aware of is in
>> the part of Henrik's  excellent WG status pages, which don't recognize
>> that these documents  belong to us (I understand he's working on a way
>> to fix that).
>

Talk about great timing!  Thanks.

-- Jeff

---

From: Ken Raeburn <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 19:49:46 -0500

>> as an individual submission.

But not if they're being moved from one WG to another, or from a dead 
WG to individual, and restarting the counter at 00 in the process?

Ken

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 22:29:58 -0600

Hi, Julien,

I'm enjoying the conversation in this thread, but do need to provide a 
word of explanation:

- I actually believed Coya, and spent several IETFs doing the 
newcomers orientation and WG chair training telling people that they 
DON'T have to rename drafts,

- I got significant pushback from a fair number of serious 
participants that they couldn't parse the blizzard of I-D 
announcements and missed WG drafts when WGs DON'T name (which includes 
"re-name") their drafts, including people who don't even open all of 
the announcements (just scanning the subject lines, which contain only 
the filename),

- so I quit arguing with everyone EXCEPT Coya and started telling 
people the whole sordid story, ending with "so it looks like you'll 
get better eyeball counts from serious participants if you DO rename 
your WG drafts".

I'd love to be able to give better guidance than "some WG drafts are 
more renamed than others", especially when (as I said) people are 
TRYING to use the filenames as metadata, and are not succeeding in all 
cases.

Just for your amusement, my awareness of this topic started about four 
years ago when I was listening to someone who'd been around longer 
than me sighing that he used to read ALL the DRAFTS, but was now 
unable to read all the draft ABSTRACTS... and I can't remember if that 
was Klensin or not :-)

Have a great weekend,

Spencer

From: "Julien Laganier" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>; "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 7:57 AM
Subject: Re: MARID back from the grave?

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 10:21:13 +0900

>  AND they've been previously published as an individual submission.

from the line of commentary that John Klensin has been pursuing, it might be worth looking at Tony's suggestion, in terms of effort and efficacy.

The suggestion is reasonable one, if the community feels that there is important quality control (or equivalent) issue in strictly regulating name assignment.  Unfortunately, it adds more procedure onto a process that is already signficant.  Enforcing contingent restrictions take careful attention by Secretariat staff.

Is this really the sort of thing we want to focus on?

It's just a name.

 d/

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 01:37:33 -0600

... "it's just a name" - and it's not like working groups are (or that 
working groups should be) consistent in when they adopt a draft as a 
working group draft.

I see this as a bigger problem - some working groups that have more 
work in individual drafts than in working group drafts, because they 
wait until they have substantial consensus around drafts before even 
adopting them, while other working groups create initial text as 
working group drafts and then start wordsmithing from there - but 
haven't found anyone else that was interested in formalizing what it 
means when working groups adopt a draft.

My particular interest was as part of ICAR - I was thinking that 
there's a blizzard of individual drafts, but if something is adopted 
as a working group draft, it starts to absorb working group and AD 
time (at a minumum), so this transition point might be a good 
opportunity for a formal review.

But ICAR won't be worrying about this topic anytime in the foreseeable 
future :-)

Spencer

From: "Dave Crocker" <[email-masked]>
To: "Tony Hansen" <[email-masked]>; "John C Klensin" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 7:21 PM
Subject: Re: MARID back from the grave?

.................................................

It's just a name.

 d/
 --
 Dave Crocker

---

From: Dave Singer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 09:59:19 +0000

Um, I'm maybe an innocent bystander here, but perhaps the following works?

a) renaming of the root portion of the file-name is permitted, nay 
encouraged, to identify whether the draft is currently individual, or 
owned by a group (or even to select a 'better' name for other 
reasons);

b) the revision number is NOT reset when the name is otherwise changed;

c) all drafts must include a revision history including the full name 
under which each draft was presented.

This makes clear the current status, the prior status, whether the 
draft is new (-00) or not, and enables the other obvious rules.  IETF 
secretariat and others can clearly see when a draft is new or not, 
and everyone can (we hope) see who 'owns' the draft and its rough 
subject from the file name.

-- 
David Singer
Apple Computer/QuickTime

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 19:14:51 -0800

>  under which each draft was presented.

this is in line with some other postings, and I think it is quite a good summary.  retaining version history is a nice touch.

in terms of naming, I think syntactically it reduces to:

  I-D-Name       =  "draft-" owner "-" category "=" title "-" version
 
  owner          =  author-name / "ietf"
                   ; who retains change control

  author-name    = { last name of first author }
 
  category       =  working-group / topic 

  working-group  = { IETF working group }

  topic          = { term under which I-D topic fits}

  title          = { text specific to this I-D, to describe it }

 * Version 0 must be submitted some extra amount of time before an IETF meeting.

 * Use of the working group name is authorized by the working group chair and represents an explicit hand-off of change-control for the document, to the IETF.

 * If a working group goes defunct, prior to RFC publication of the I-D, "ownership" reverts to the authors.
d/ 

 d/

---

From: "Marshall Eubanks" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 23:05:45 -0500

Should there be provision in this naming scheme 
for the merging of two individual drafts into
one wg draft ?

Regards
Marshall Eubanks

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 19:14:51 -0800
 Dave Crocker <[email-masked]> wrote:
>  * Use of the working group name is authorized by the working group chair and represents an
> explicit hand-off of change-control for the document, to the IETF.
>

---

From: Dave Singer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 18:19:38 +0000

At 7:14 PM -0800 2/25/05, Dave Crocker wrote:
>>Ý a) renaming of the root portion of the file-name is permitted, nay
>>
>>Ý encouraged, to identify whether the draft is currently individual, or
>>Ý owned by a group (or even to select a 'better' name for other
>>Ý reasons);
>>Ý b) the revision number is NOT reset when the name is otherwise changed;
>>Ý c) all drafts must include a revision history including the full name
>>Ý under which each draft was presented.
>
>
>this is in line with some other postings, and I 
>think it is quite a good summary.  retaining 
>version history is a nice touch.

Thanks.  I forgot to say on (c) that there MUST 
be as many entries in the revision history as the 
revision number indicates (i.e. none for revision 
00, and so on).  Perhaps a standard format of the 
revision history would help?  Clearly file name, 
submision date, summary of the nature of what's 
new in this version...

>  * Use of the working group name is authorized 
>by the working group chair and represents an 
>  * If a working group goes defunct, prior to RFC 
>publication of the I-D, "ownership" reverts to 
>the authors.
>d/
>
>   
>
>
>  d/
>  --
>  Dave Crocker
>  dcrocker Ýa t ...
>  WE'VE MOVED to: Ýwww.bbiw.net

-- 
David Singer
Apple Computer/QuickTime

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 22:14:05 -0500

> 00, and so on).

don't do that.  it will add an unnecessary and often useless barrier to
publication of I-Ds   

I-Ds are supposed to be a quick-and-dirty mechanism for 
circulating (sometimes quite rough) drafts among interested parties.  we

don't need to impose a complicated revision history mechanism just 
because we have two different cutoff dates for I-Ds.  and there's 
certainly no need to impose such a requirement on drafts that 
(a) aren't WG work items and
(b) are submitted before the earlier cutoff date.

Keith