Re: [lisp] Warren Kumari's Discuss on draft-ietf-lisp-rfc6830bis-26: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Alissa Cooper <[e-mail]>]

Hi Dino,

> On Feb 6, 2019, at 12:48 PM, Dino Farinacci <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Warren, thanks for the review, I have changed text to address your comments and nits below. A new diff file is enclosed at the end.
> 
> I want to send one message to the IESG. This has no reflection on Warren or his commentary. But the standards process seems to be at an all-time low for my prespective. And this Jan 2019 I have been coming to IETF for 30 years. So I think I’m not speaking off the cuff here and speak from what I have experienced over that long time frame.

Thanks for sharing your view with us.

> 
> We have been trying to get these documents to move forward and it seems with all the new people that come to the IESG that do the reviews are not expert in the art and hence we have to explain basic LISP. It has been happening for about 6 quarters now. We explain, people understand, a quarter passes, there is silence, new people come into the review process, and we explain again.

The full history of the processing of this document is available at: <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-lisp-rfc6830bis/history/>. As you can see, IESG processing of this document began in September 2018, a little less than 5 months ago. The exact same IESG members were balloting on the document then as are balloting now since there has been no turnover in the IESG between now and then.

Of course, the full WG and IETF review processes have extended further into the past than that. Part of the point of standardizing in the IETF is to obtain cross-area input from those who may have expertise, but not necessarily expertise in dealing with the protocol being specified. If there was no interest in getting cross-area review for LISP, it shouldn’t have been put forth on the IETF standards track. And part of the value of IESG review in particular is to determine if an independent implementer could pick up the spec and produce an interoperable implementation with those written by, say, the spec authors. The DISCUSS criteria are available here: <https://www.ietf.org/blog/discuss-criteria-iesg-review/>.

For this document and its companions in particular, there has been more back-and-forth with the IESG than is typical. Clearly many of us are not LISP experts and we appreciate the insights that you and your co-authors have shared to help us understand the protocol better. We also had holidays intervene to lengthen the review process. But typically our engagements with authors are also more comprehensive: authors implement agreed-upon changes fully and in a single or small number of revs so that it’s easy to re-evaluate the document, the authors check for internal consistency between inter-dependent documents before posting revs, and the answers they provide in email offer specific pointers to text or list discussion to back up their arguments. The re-review process for these documents has suffered from a lack of this kind of engagement, in my opinion. 

> 
> We have redone text so many times that likely have undone commentary from people that were experienced in the art who commented years ago. What if they come back in now and say “you change the text again”.

IETF work is based on the consensus of people present. Hopefully the changes being made in this round will not require sending these documents back for another WG consensus call. But if they do, the question is whether the people engaged now want the documents published as-is. That is the best that we can do.

> 
> To the authors, this seems non-sense, never ending and not productive. One can see why open-source approaches are out competing the IETF process. I’ll stop there.

In many cases open source and open standards aren’t really even adversarial to one another. But it’s true that if what you were after was an open source implementation, or a process where a limited set of contributors could decide on an implementation design, an IETF standard is not a good fit for that.

> 
> I’ll explain once again in the DISCUSS comments below because I know Warren put effort into this when he should have been resting.  ;-)

The IESG typically processes 300-400 pages of IETF documents every two weeks. From what I’ve seen it is a hard working group that puts in a tremendous amount of effort to do a job that is important for the Internet but mostly thankless.

Alissa