Re: [I18ndir] I-D on filesystem I18N

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Tuesday, July 7, 2020 15:14 +0200 Patrik Fältström
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 7 Jul 2020, at 14:27, John C Klensin wrote:
> 
>> riority question: we have a whole series of long-outstanding
>> and core i18n documents more or less in queue with
>> draft-faltstrom-unicode12 (and the now-required
>> draft-faltstrom-unicode13), draft-klensin-idna-rfc5891bis,
>> draft-freytag-troublesome-characters, and some SMTPUTF8
>> ("EAI") tweaks that have not been turned into I-Ds as obvious
>> examples along with, perhaps, draft-sullivan-lucid-prob-stmt,
>> the notorious draft-klensin-idna-5892upd-unicode70, and
>> others.  How do we want to prioritize those probably tedious
>> (but important to make/keep existing standards track specs
>> workping] well) specs versus work relative to Nico's much
>> more exciting file system proposal?
> 
> "My" documents will be worked on starting next week when I on
> Tuesday is back from vacation. I.e. 7 days from now.

Patrik,

Thanks but not my point (and I have not been working on "my"
documents much either).  

The problem I'm concerned about is that, when you decide those
documents are ready (or other authors decided theirs are ready),
they are going to need serious review by people with significant
i18n expertise, significant IETF protocol expertise, and
significant expertise with the combination.   Assuming the
relevant document(s) go into IETF LC and that any substantive
issues raised there are addressed, the reviews I'm talking about
have to be broad enough and careful enough that Barry and Murray
(plus or minus the document shepherd) are able to convince IESG
members that they should not tie things up in DISCUSS votes
because they think things should be different based on their
personal (and obviously deep, or they wouldn't be on the IESG,
right?) understanding of i18n issues.

At least most such reviews are almost certainly going to have to
come from this directorate list because, whatever the strengths
and weaknesses of this group, it probably includes almost
everyone who has been active in the IETF on i18n work and who
has a reasonable claim to broad expertise on at least some i18n
topics (I can identify a few exceptions, but don't expect them
to be active any time soon).  And, as we have repeatedly
discovered working together, i18n documents (at least) get much
better with active collaboration and discussion, not just
reviews thrown over the wall.

However, with regard to doing that sort of collaboration
(independent of a few reviews of documents from assorted IETF
WGs), the directorate seems to be both disfunctional and lacking
any form of leadership or guidance.   And, if we can't get
enough collaboration (or some form of aggressive push-back), I
think the experience with RFC 8753 and with 5891bis strongly
suggests that more work on any of those documents may be a waste
of effort.

   best,
    john