Re: [Sipping] A call for simplicity: Was I-DAction:draft-ietf-sipping-cc-transfer-12.txt

["Mary Barnes" <[e-mail]>]

Yeah, this has been a while, BUT there were delays in getting some of
the updates done and confusion (on both sides as I recall) as to who had
the editor's token for a while.  

But, these updates as I understand are based on IESG feedback, so the
doc is out of the WG and has been for over a year - it's no longer being
targetted for meeting (or ML for that matter) discussion.  You can look
at the stats here as far as how long it did sit in the WG (and how long
it's been out of the WG):
http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecycle/draft-ietf-sipping-cc-transfer-timi
ng.html

And, I think we actually have worse examples and some currently
chartered items are also only getting updated just before meetings, so
yes there is a problem in SIPPING with getting work done efficiently,
but I personally believe the primary issue is limited resources and the
fact that folks just would prefer to work on shiny new things than
rewrite sentences, fix commas, clarify and beef up security sections,
etc. in their documents. 

And, I do think your mega discussion is more appropriate for RAI
restructuring than on SIPPING. I think we have improved the expediency
of processing WG documents over the past few years and one of the
problems in the past was just too many active, chartered WG items at one
time, which I think is one of the main points for the RAI restructuring.

Mary. 

-----Original Message-----
From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On
Behalf Of Dean Willis
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 11:55 AM
To: sipping LIST
Subject: [Sipping] A call for simplicity: Was
I-DAction:draft-ietf-sipping-cc-transfer-12.txt


On Mar 3, 2009, at 11:15 AM, [e-mail] wrote:

> A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts 
> directories.
> This draft is a work item of the Session Initiation Proposal 
> Investigation Working Group of the IETF.

At the risk of sounding like Henry, I think we have good cause to worry
when we consider that we are on the 12th rev of our call transfer draft,
and that the SIPPING working group version was preceded by 5 versions in
the SIP working group. Even earlier, we had the original one individual
version published in March, 2000.

What kind of monster have we created that it takes nine years and 18
versions of a draft to specify call transfer, and we're still not done?
The kudzu has eaten the crop, and it may be time to just spray Roundup
on the whole field and replant. Learning to eat kudzu is not a viable
option.

Seriously, we need to step back, take a deep breath, and think very
seriously about simplifying the whole SIP framework instead of
elaborating it further. I don't know that I completely agree with JDR's
modest proposal about accepting the SIP-as-SBC-mediated-
telephony-over-IP model as our entire scope, but we have to do
something.

How about freezing SIP 2.0 in maintenance mode, taking on no further
work (except for bug fixes), and starting a SIP 3.0 exercise that uses
things we learned from SIP 2.0, including but not limited to:

1) Isolating the application, transaction, rendezvous/naming, and
transport layers.

2) Supporting, or better, fundamentally integrating strong end-to-end
identity.

3) Recognizing and formalizing the roles of active intermediaries that
exceed the limitations of SIP 2.0 proxies.

4) Limiting optionality.

5) Including strong compliance specifications that can be tested against
and certified independently.

I'd also like to put in some text about reusing/sharing connections and
muxing signaling and media onto an address/port pair, but I'm sure that
would cause somebody around here to self-destruct. Perhaps this could be
accomplished by:

6) Assume that NAT, NAPT, and address family (IPv4/IPv6) translators are
ubiquitous, and based on this assumption optimize the protocol design so
as to minimize the protocol adaptation mechanics required to traverse
those translators. In other words, stop referring to addresses and ports
inside the payload.


Note: From a metrics perspective, it is interesting that the draft has
been revised just over twice for every three meetings, which may go
towards disproving the "drafts are revised for each meeting" theory, or
perhaps restating it as "Drafts are revised, on average, no more than
once for each meeting cycle."


--
Dean Willis, frustrated SIP gardener.

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