Re: [Iasa20] draft-ietf-iasa2-consolidated-upd-06

[Alissa Cooper <[e-mail]>]

Hi John,

> On Mar 7, 2019, at 7:56 PM, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> --On Thursday, March 7, 2019 16:52 -0500 Alissa Cooper
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Brian,
>> 
>>> On Mar 7, 2019, at 2:46 PM, Brian E Carpenter
>>> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On 08-Mar-19 06:12, Alissa Cooper wrote:
>>>> Thanks. I still don't think this is quite right because
>>>> there is no basis for this working group to obsolete or
>>>> render historic RFC 3929 simply because it mentions the IETF
>>>> Executive Director. It seems that RFC 3929 should be treated
>>>> in Section 2 the same as the other documents in that section.
>>> 
>>> There's a more general issue: tracking down all "open"
>>> Experimental RFCs and deciding which of them need to be
>>> closed off as Historic or Obsolete or both. <joke>No doubt
>>> the IESG will be doing this in its copious free time.</joke>
>>> But for the present, doesn't it make more sense to clear both
>>> 3929 and 4633 up right away? I agree that it's outside the
>>> WG's mandate, strictly interpreted, but if the IESG consents,
>>> is that really a problem?
>> 
>> Yes. The point of charters is to scope working groups' work.
>> This working group is chartered to to document the normative
>> changes to IETF administrative structures and processes
>> necessary to effectuate the change to IASA 2.0. Obsoleting
>> documents about other things because they are out of date is
>> not within the charter.
> 
> Alissa,
> 
> I was in the process of putting together a discussion of the
> IETF's history with making things Historic and then Brian's note
> arrived and I concluded that maybe I was missing your main point
> and I discarded that note.  We may have a small difference of
> opinion about what it means to "scope working groups' work",
> which I want to try to summarize below.
> 
> However, I, and I assume most WG participants, am much more
> interested in getting this work finished than in arguing so, if
> you are putting on your Responsible AD hat and telling me to
> change this, I will certainly do so.

Yes, I am.

Thanks,
Alissa

> 
> To me, there are two closely-related principles for charters and
> limits on the scope of a WG's work:
> 
> (1) To be sure enough that the community is aware of what the WG
> is doing so that IETF participants who are skilled in the topic
> area(s) and materially concerned can either participate or
> otherwise follow the WG's efforts and, in particular, are not
> blindsided at IETF LC time or later.
> 
> (2) To lower the odds that the WG will go off in the weeds in a
> major way, in particular by exceeding its competence and/or
> taking up time that detracts from the overall planned schedule
> or other tasks, and giving people who believe it is doing that a
> basis for raising objections.
> 
> However, I think it is also important to keep some perspective
> and flexibility on charters and scope if those principles are
> not grossly violated.  One of the hallmarks of the IETF (and the
> network specification development mechanisms long before it) has
> been that it is far more important to get the right things to
> happen and get the right things done than to go looking for
> rules to interpret and enforce narrowly.  Some of us have even
> argued in other contexts that, in addition to technical
> advantages, much of the reason why the core technology for
> modern networking is TCP/IP and related protocols as specified
> by the IETF and its predecessor rather than, e.g., OSI, is
> precisely that focus on getting the right things done rather
> that spending disproportionate energy figuring out the letter of
> the are and enforcing them.
> 
> So, in this particular case, the WG, working well within its
> scope, discovered some now-problematic phrasing in 3929.   In
> the process of figuring out how to fix that, it was observed
> that the document was almost certainly no longer relevant.  The
> conclusion, as I understood it, was that getting it off the list
> of things that people were expected to read and understand would
> be a more efficient fix than patching a phrase in a seriously
> old document and perhaps creating confusion about whether the
> specified experiment was still alive and relevant.  That is not
> exceeding the WG's task area or competence, because almost
> anyone could spot the relative obsolescence of the spec and the
> problem was discovered in the process of doing the WG's work.
> It didn't take extra time or effort.  Ted (the author), who
> appears to be following the WG's work, didn't stand up and say
> "no, no, that experiment is still active and the document is
> still alive" and neither did anyone else.  I assume any such
> substantive objection would have immediately killed the "make
> Historic" plan.
> 
> So, yes, the decision could be to just patch the document
> because making it Historic is not strictly within the WG's scope
> but I don't see any possible harm that could result from just
> getting 3929 off everyone's radar and out of the way.   In
> addition, now that the problem has been identified and with a
> nod to Brian's joke, do you really want to either get a request
> for a WG or an individual submission to make 3929 Historic?
> While I certainly would not want to advocate a hunting
> expedition to identify and consider all of outstanding
> Experimental documents and figure out which ones should be
> Historic and/or Obsolete, in this case, the hard work of
> identifying a relevant document and even writing an appropriate
> sentence has been done already.
> 
> best,
>    john
>