Re: [urn] Adam Roach's Discuss on draft-ietf-urnbis-ns-reg-transition-08: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Spencer Dawkins <[e-mail]>]

Dear All,

On 08/05/2017 04:15 PM, Adam Roach wrote:
> On 8/3/17 7:49 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
>> Sadly, I don't think I was overreacting.  Consequently, unless
>> this DISCUSS can be resolved in some other way today, I will
>> submit a formal appeal against your use of a blocking DISCUSS on
>> an essentially editorial matter that puts form over substance
>> and that is abusive of working group decisions and the Last Call
>> and IESG review processes.
>
>
> John --
>
> Thanks for sharing your rather extensive thoughts on this topic. I 
> apologize that I was unable to meet your deadline of "today," as I was 
> physically located in a part of the world that had limited to no data 
> connectivity by the time you had sent it.
>
> As Martin points out, I'm still rather junior at this position, and 
> have been led to believe that the Discuss Criteria 
> <https://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/discuss-criteria.html> has some 
> fundamental authority to it. You will note, for example, that the 
> DISCUSS ballot I entered was carefully selected, in a word-for-word 
> fashion, from that document. I'm also under the impression that the 
> current version of the ID-Checklist 
> <https://www.ietf.org/id-info/checklist.html>, having had extensive 
> discussions on the IETF mailing list, is a reflection of IETF 
> consensus regarding the form and format of documents to be turned over 
> to the RFC editor. Interpreted that way, I have concerns that I would 
> be derelict in my duties if I allowed an author to unilaterally ignore 
> guidance that has received IETF-wide review. I'll return to this in a 
> moment.
>
> I do very much appreciate that you had already formulated a compromise 
> proposal with the intention of sharing it at some point. I find your 
> intended formulation (as hinted by the snippet you included) to 
> satisfy both word and spirit of the ID-Checklist provision for 
> abstracts to indicate document obsoletion.
>
> At the same time, you have raised a host of collateral points of 
> interest regarding the provenance and maintenance of Discuss Criteria 
> and ID-Checklist. If we had a common understanding of their authority, 
> then the path forward would be clear: if these documents are merely 
> advisory and have no power to bind, then I'm free to concede the point 
> and allow you to push forward with a document that does not conform to 
> their contents -- and would likely do so at this point. Alternately, 
> if they are expected by the IETF community to be binding, then it 
> would seem my duty to assist in their enforcement. We could hold the 
> publication of this document until we were able to resolve which of 
> these two situations is true, but it seems a mild disservice to the 
> URNBIS working group to do so.
>
> In an attempt to avoid delaying this document unnecessarily, I propose 
> the following path forward:
>
>  1. You provide your aforementioned compromise text to Alexey (in his
>     role as sponsoring AD) for inclusion as an RFC Editor Note, and I
>     will clear my DISCUSS position.
>
>  2. As a tactical matter, you propose to the IESG a set of
>     administrative updates to the ID-Checklist document reflecting
>     those areas you believe it has fallen out of maintenance (e.g.,
>     the reference to an older version of the RFC style manual).  I
>     would expect these to be mechanical and uncontroversial to apply.
>
>  3. As a strategic matter, you or we begin a conversation with the
>     IETF community at large regarding the provenance and authority of
>     the Discuss Criteria and ID-Checklist documents. I do not want to
>     presuppose the outcome of those conversations, so I suggest no
>     specific potential conclusions. I'm happy to help you with
>     formulation of the question, if you'd like, but I don't feel
>     compelled to insert myself in doing so if you'd prefer to ask in
>     your own terms.
>
>  4. Subsequent to conclusion of that conversation, and contingent on
>     its outcome, we begin a conversation with the IETF community at
>     large regarding the ambiguities you perceive as being present in
>     the ID-Checklist so that we can more precisely reflect an IETF
>     consensus position in its contents.
>

It may be helpful to note that I would support this resolution, or 
something like it. There are other resolutions that I would also 
support, of course.

If I might offer what I hope is a friendly amendment to Adam's proposal, 
I wouldn't mind seeing a list of the updates named in (2) before asking 
people to develop actual update text.

And thanks for making that proposal.

Spencer