[nfsv4] Ben Campbell's Abstain on draft-ietf-nfsv4-mv1-msns-update-04: (with COMMENT)

[Datatracker on behalf of Ben Campbell <[e-mail]>]

Ben Campbell has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-nfsv4-mv1-msns-update-04: Abstain

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The document, along with other ballot positions, can be found here:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-nfsv4-mv1-msns-update/



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COMMENT:
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Thanks for the huge amount of work in this draft, but I cannot recommend
publishing it in it's current form. I am balloting "ABSTAIN" rather than
"DISCUSS", so that I do not get in the way of publication if the rest of the
IESG thinks it's fine as is. I apologize for not doing a more technical review,
but I think the structural issues need to be addressed first.

I once spent several weeks over a summer in high school applying page updates
to a shelf full of US Tax Code binders in a CPAs office. The IRS, (or whoever
published the code) would send out boxes of new page-sets, each labeled for
which original pages it would replace.  When we were done in the CPA office, we
had a coherent set of documents, at least to the degree you can apply words
like "coherent" to tax codes.

This draft does something akin to that, except that we don't end up with a
coherent document as a result. If the RFC Editor applied patches from RFCs that
 "UPDATE" other RFCs to render final text,  things would be different. But that
doesn't happen with RFCs.  That being said, I don't object to RFC updates in
general, as long as those updates are simple and fairly self-contained. But
this draft is over 100 pages of intricate updates, reorganizations, and
explanatory text. This will make life very hard for readers that were not
involved in the standards process.

I think the right approach for an update of this complexity is to just do a
5661bis draft, and use this one as an input to that. Such a bis draft could be
something as simple as applying the changes in this draft (and maybe
trunking-update)  and publishing the result.