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

[Dino Farinacci <[e-mail]>]

> 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.

Rather than questioning my accuracy of the past, don’t lose the point of the comment. From my point of view, this has gone on for 1.5 years. Just this last epoch review. Note the working group started in 2009.

> 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 

And why do you think that has been the case?

> 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. 

Well the reviewers don’t have the history of the past nearly 12 years this effort has gone on for. So we can’t just change fully or else we disrespect the reviewers that have commented from the past. Not to mention implementations that have been around or 7 years and deployments in place.

We really want an IETF document to reflect reality.

> 
>> 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.

I remember working at cisco when we had to build chips for next-generation routers. Estimates indicated that it would take 5 years to build for a new cutting edge next-generation tech. If it takes that long, then when you release you have an obsolete product.

I fear this is what is happening to this document series. I am trying to avoid that and hence some push back on changing text that was agreed upon many times and many years ago.

> 
>> 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.

Adversarial is not the right word I think. More people are going to open-source projects than building technology through SDOs. This should be totally obvious.

>> 
>> 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.

Yes, I understand the load. So it would seem the IESG would want to close issues quicker.

Dino