Re: [Gen-art] Genart last call review of draft-klensin-idna-rfc5891bis-04

[Vijay Gurbani <[e-mail]>]

Dear John: Thanks a lot for your response.

Please see inline.

On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 12:53 PM John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> I really appreciate your making your way through the document
> despite your lack of experience with what you refer to as the
> arcana.


My apologies; by employing the term "arcana", I did not intend to be
pejorative in any sense.
It is a good thing, in my opinion, that we in the IETF are comfortable
discussing such arcana
in the protocols that we create.

That said ...

Your review identifies a general problem with many IETF
> "area" reviews.  Using this document as an example, it, and its
> companion, draft-klensin-idna-unicode-review, are essentially
> just clarifying updates to he base IDNA document collection.  A
> review for substantive technical issues requires a thorough
> understanding of those base documents in order to understand
> what is being clarified or changed, and why, and what the state
> of things was (and would continue to be) without the updates.
> If you didn't follow that work and aren't interested and
> motivated to dig deeply into it today, we can't expect you to do
> that review and I (and I hope others), are very grateful for the
> more general reviews you and others are doing.  However, I think
> the IETF (and the IESG in particular) needs to keep in mind that
> the type of review you have done, while very important and
> useful, is not a substitute for that more specific type of
> in-depth technical reviews.  We need both and it is not clear to
> me that we are doing as good a job of the latter as we used to.
>

... I suspect that the IESG, in general, recognizes that the reviews done
by members of the
Gen-ART team are generalist in nature and not specific to the details that
are apparent to
the specific WG tasked with producing that I-D.

The purview of the Gen-ART review is provided in [1], and my apologies if
you are already
familiar with the mission of Gen-ART.  If not, the quoted text in [1]
appears to address your
concern that the IESG is aware that my review is definitely not a
substitute for an in-depth
technical review that can be provided by members of the WG.  (On occasions
that as a
Gen-ART reviewer, I get an I-D that pertains to the work I do and the WGs I
participate
in, then I relish going deeper into the technical aspects as well.)

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/genart/about/

Quoting the relevant parts from the above URL, "The GEN-ART reviews are
performed for one of
three reasons. Most Gen-ART reviews are now assigned at IETF Last Call
(answer #1). If
a document is revised after IETF Last Call, or is processed so quickly that
no
Gen-ART reviewer has been assigned, it's reviewed after being placed on the
IESG Telechat
agenda (answer #2). Some ADs also request an Early Review before IETF Last
Call - typically
once the document is considered fairly mature and stable within the working
group (answer #3).

Gen-ART reviewers are supposed to provide generalist reviews to Gen-ART
(when reviewers are
experts in a particular field, they should provide expert review to the
working group, prior to
IETF Last Call), so reviewers may recuse themselves...."

Cheers,

- vijay