Re: [Gen-art] Gen-ART Last Call review of draft-ietf-isis-prefix-attributes-03

["Les Ginsberg (ginsberg)" <[e-mail]>]

Paul -

Attached is a diff file w the changes I have made to address your comments. Please let me know if this suffices.

(co-authors - please let me know if you have any concerns regarding the proposed changes)

Thanx.

   Les


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Kyzivat [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2016 12:49 PM
> To: Les Ginsberg (ginsberg); [e-mail]
> Cc: General Area Review Team
> Subject: Re: Gen-ART Last Call review of draft-ietf-isis-prefix-attributes-03
> 
> Hi Les,
> 
> Trimming to the relevant points:
> 
> On 1/3/16 9:27 AM, Les Ginsberg (ginsberg) wrote:
> 
> >> Note that at the end of the day my comments are just suggestions. You
> >> can act on them or not. They only become binding if the IESG decides
> >> to raise them.
> >
> > [Les:] I want you to know that I take your comments seriously - binding or
> not. You obviously invested time in reviewing - which I appreciate.
> 
> Thanks. Genart is educational for the reviewers (at least for me) because we
> are usually reviewing things we know nothing about! It often takes some
> sniffing around to gain enough context to do the review.
> 
> But I think that is the point of genart - to get a review from somebody who
> doesn't already know the subject.
> 
> >> Understood. But the abstract will be seen by many (like me) who don't
> >> fall into that category. They are left entirely in the dark about what this is
> about.
> >> Might it be something they *ought* to be interested in?
> >> After reading the abstract, the only clue I had about the scope of
> >> this document was the name of the wg from the draft name. And once
> >> this becomes an RFC that won't be available as a hint. I had to look
> >> up isis in the list of WGs to discover that this was in the routing
> >> area. Then I had to do more searching to figure out what IS-IS was about.
> >>
> >
> > [Les:] The title (even once it becomes an RFC) includes "IS-IS".  If you don't
> know that IS-IS is a routing protocol, do you think that further clarification is
> needed to help you understand that this isn't something which you are
> interested in reading?
> 
> It is sufficient to get people to stop reading and ignore it. Maybe that is
> enough.
> 
> But for the person who goes a step further and pulls the full document and
> still doesn't know, it would be nice to add an informative reference to the
> intro, to a base document for IS-IS. As best I can tell, the likely one is
> RFC1195. For example, revise the first sentence of the intro:
> 
>     There are existing use cases for IS-IS [RFC1195] in which knowing
>     additional attributes of a network prefix is useful.
> 
> >>> In regards to the term "prefix", you seem to be expecting the
> >>> document to
> >> define that term - but in looking at multiple RFCs I do not see
> >> precedent for that. It is part of the base knowledge that has been
> >> assumed that readers understand . Perhaps this is a bad practice -
> >> but if so there are many documents - not restricted solely to IS-IS
> >> related documents - that could be critiqued on this basis. I would
> >> ask that this comment be viewed in a larger context - I don't think
> >> this particular draft should be asked to deviate from common practice
> without larger guidance from the IETF community.
> >>
> >> Not a definition, just a disambiguation. Simply replacing "prefix"
> >> with "network prefix" would have met my need.
> >>
> >
> > [Les:] You are proposing that "prefix" be replaced by "network prefix"
> throughout the document?
> > This has not been done in any of the existing RFCs that I checked.
> 
> Not everywhere, just one or a few places - say in the abstract and the intro.
> 
> >>> In regards to "references to the Introduction", I emphasize that the
> >> Introduction is neither normative nor exhaustive. It is meant to
> >> provide some examples of cases where the information contained in the
> >> new advertisements could be useful. I therefore find that references
> >> to it would be inappropriate.
> >>
> >> I guess I wasn't clear. I was suggesting that reference(s) be added
> >> to the introduction. (References are not permitted in the abstract,
> >> but they are allowed in the intro.) A reference to the base
> >> specification for the internet version of IS-IS would have helped me.
> >>
> >
> > [Les:] I usually constrain references to those which are actually useful in the
> context of the topics being discussed in the draft. Base specifications are not
> directly referenced in this draft because we are extending TLVs which were
> defined in RFCs issued long after the base specifications were published.
> However, the following could be added to the introduction:
> >
> > "IS-IS is a link state routing protocol defined in [ISO10589] and [RFC1195].
> Extensions in support of advertising new forms of IP/IPv6 prefix reachability
> are defined in [RFC5305], [RFC5308], and [RFC5120]."
> >
> > Is this what you had in mind?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> 	Thanks,
> 	Paul
>