Re: RANT: posting IDs more often -- more is better -- why are we so shy?

[Joe Touch <[e-mail]>]

Hi, Michael,

On 3/1/2017 6:05 PM, Michael Richardson wrote:
> Joe Touch <[e-mail]> wrote:
>     > FWIW, industry often doesn't let out ideas until filing preliminary
>     > patents, which has a similar effect.
>
>     > AFAICT, the speed of an -00 is more tightly correlated to the
>     > motivation for the document.
>
> Good point, but tell me why -01 and -09 and -17 don't come out faster?
> If it's because the authors are busy, and aren't working on that document,
> that's fine.  But I'm seeing some kind of shyness to putting new versions out.

I'm not sure it's easy to determine except on a case-by-case basis.

Other reasons: the community wasn't ready for the doc yet, other docs
took priority (for the author or WG), there might be lots of email list
activity to resolve an issue, etc.

> Is there a distrust of documents which have "too many" revisions?
I'm not sure I'd call it "distrust". But it is hard to keep up with a
constant stream of revisions, esp. for very large docs.

> Should the beautiful history bar in the datatracker, have some measure of
> changes?  Would graph of lines changed (in the XML!) per revision be
> interesting?   Would that help know how close a document is to being ready?
Not necessarily. First, moving sections around can give a false sense of
a major change. And a doc that is only wordsmithed could either be close
to being ready or be an indication of apathy.

There's no substitute for actually tracking what's going on with a
document, and no replacement for a person investing time to figure that out.

Joe