[dns-at-ietf] Re: managing workload within and across DNS WGs

[Petr Špaček <[e-mail]>]

On 07. 11. 25 14:45, Wes Hardaker wrote:
> Ondřej Surý <[e-mail]> writes:
>> With groups large in content and people like dnsop, one of the problem
>> that I have as a chair are the following indicators:
>>
>> - Is there enough interest in the draft?
>> - Has there been enough reviews?
>> - Has the consensus been reached?
> 
> I think those are good helpful questions, thank you.  Do they work for
> satisfying whether or not a draft is ready for last call though?  One of
> the load issues, IMHO, is not just can we take it on (interest and
> enthusiasm are common) but also "was it actively worked on"?  A common
> pattern with overloaded groups can be that Last Calls bring up a ton of
> issues because people ignored it until that point.  How do you work
> around this sort of problem?

I think requiring implementations before it is allowed to progress 
through a suitable point in the process is a good filter. If authors are 
not committed they will not spend time fiddling with code.

Ad the argument 'but that would create a group of gatekeepers':

If we accept workload is an issue, we can either:
a) Increase processing capacity - seems unlikely to me.
b) Decrease workload by refusing some work.


Going further, it might not be obvious, but such group already exists - 
it is implementations. Might be easy to forget, but IETF produces 
_voluntary_ standards, and implementers already pick what to do.

So yeah, the group might continue churning out documents, but IMHO it is 
more useful if the documents have chance of being implemented. Otherwise 
precious WG time will be burned on RFCs do not see implementation and/or 
even work when implemented later on.

Just from a quick glance this list problematic documents would include:

- RFC 7706: Decreasing Access Time to Root Servers by Running One on 
Loopback (implemented differently)
- RFC 7828: The edns-tcp-keepalive EDNS0 Option
- RFC 7901: CHAIN Query Requests in DNS
- RFC 8020 NXDOMAIN: There Really Is Nothing Underneath - cannot be 
switched on
- RFC 8094: DNS over Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS)
- RFC 8145: Signaling Trust Anchor Knowledge in DNS Security Extensions 
(DNSSEC) - implemented but data were so bad that it had to be replaced 
with RFC 8509 shortly
- RFC 8490: DNS Stateful Operations
- RFC 8767: Serving Stale Data to Improve DNS Resiliency (implemented 
differently)
- RFC 8806: Running a Root Server Local to a Resolver (implemented 
differently)
- RFC 9102: TLS DNSSEC Chain Extension
- RFC 9567: DNS Error Reporting

Obviously I did not go through list of all the RFCs every published.

-- 
Petr Špaček