Re: To "lose the argument in the WG"

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 15/02/2017 06:05, Dave Crocker wrote:
...
>       IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures
>       https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2418
> 
>>    This Last Call will announce the intention of
>>    the IESG to consider the document, and it will solicit final comments
>>    from the IETF within a period of two weeks.  It is important to note
>>    that a Last-Call is intended as a brief, final check with the
>>    Internet community, to make sure that no important concerns have been
>>    missed or misunderstood. The Last-Call should not serve as a more
>>    general, in-depth review.
> 
> (I should note that that text dates back to the original version of the 
> document that Erik Huizer and I wrote, in RFC 1871, in 1994.)
> 
> 
> What folks are doing is spontaneously changing the role of this step, 
> ignoring the considerable costs and detriments, while relying on a 
> theory of benefit that is very, very, very rarely actually demonstrated.

Two points on this:

1. A claim that a choice made by the WG is not only harmful to the
protocol under review but *also* harmful to the Internet as a whole
would, I hope, always be legitimate under "no important concerns
have been missed" during IETF Last Call. That's certainly the basis
of an issue that I raised recently.

2. As a Gen-ART reviewer I've often seen drafts at IETF LC that
really *need* a general, in-depth review. As a matter of fact, as
a document editor, I just received such a review yesterday (whether
needed or not is not for me to say). So I'd say that that phrase in
RFC2418 takes a very optimistic view of quality control by WGs.

    Brian