Re: [kitten] Proposal for tracking document reviews and skipping WGLC

[Benjamin Kaduk <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 21 Jun 2016, Jeffrey Altman wrote:

> On 6/21/2016 5:03 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
> >
> > Just for the record: I think this is a fine thing to try
> > for a while, and thanks to the chairs for being willing.
> > I hope the WG are also willing to give it a shot as I figure
> > we need to make IETF stuff easier for WGs like kitten that
> > maintain important protocols through what will sometimes
> > be relatively "low energy" periods.
> >
> > S.
>
> Stephen,
>
> I will point out that even when documents complete WGLC they do not
> necessarily move forward.  For example,
>
>  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-kitten-aes-cts-hmac-sha2/
>
> which has been waiting for a write-up for five months.  This is a

Yes, my personal circumstances have conspired to not leave me a
sufficiently large chunk of uninterrupted time in which to do the writeup.
I agree that it is unfortunate, and I've come close a couple times, but
my situation is improving such that I expect this to be moving forward
soon.

> document that not only passed WGLC but has two independent interoperable
> implementations blocked waiting for assignment of ETYPE and SUMTYPE
> values by IANA.

Given our recent experiences, it's probably a good idea to have an
additional party review those implementations for compliance to the
standard.  The test vectors help a lot, of course, but there are still
some things for which review is useful.

> As a former Kitten chair, the lack of available resources to work on
> protocol design, documents, and implementations is not new.  The
> GSS/Kerberos community has suffered with resource starvation for
> decades.  Although GSS, Kerberos and other authentication technologies
> are critical to the functioning of non-web network communications there
> has never been sufficient funding available to complete even 10% of the
> work that needs to be accomplished.  This is a key factor in the time it
> takes to get things done.
>
> When the WG Chairs and key participants are not funded to work on
> GSS/Kerberos it is very hard for them to prioritize the work.  In the
> end, none of us are independently wealthy and few of participant's
> employers pay the participants for this work.

I'll trim the rest.  I do not disagree, but do think it's worth repeating
that even when the chairs have support from their employers for that work,
documents cannot move forward without review from key participants.

But no, I don't have any ideas for where the money could be found.

-Ben