Re: Last Call: draft-ietf-mif-problem-statement (Multiple Interfaces Problem Statement) to Informational RFC

[Jari Arkko <[e-mail]>]

Since someone asked about this, I wanted to clarify why and how new 
versions of this draft are being posted while the last call is going on. 
The document has been revised once in order to address two very minor 
details left over from the first round of my AD review (IMO not blocking 
issues), and a second time to address feedback from other reviewers (I 
think). There will future revisions, we just saw a review from Joel 
Halpern that appears to require a small change, for instance.

There are a couple of different ways of doing this in the IETF, but my 
personal model is to ask the authors to address feedback as soon as it 
becomes known -- even during last call. We should of course always 
carefully evaluate whether the feedback leads to document changes -- not 
all feedback does. At times we are even a bit too eager to please the 
reviewer in the IETF. But in my mind, if we end up deciding that 
something is missing or wrong, I think it is beneficial to everyone that 
the document is updated in a timely manner. As a reviewer I do not like 
to re-discover the same bugs that others have already found, and as an 
IESG reviewer I appreciate that I can see that issues from last call 
reviews were addressed. I think these benefits outweigh the cost of 
having a bit of a moving target.

(As a side note, all this would be more fun if the last call e-mails 
held a stable tools URL rather than point to the current version: 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-mif-problem-statement)

Jari