Re: A non-IPR issue (was: Re: DRAFT Revision to the WG Document Writeup)

[Russ Housley <[e-mail]>]

John:

>> ...
>>  (8) Has the Document Shepherd personally verified that the 
>>      document satisfies all ID nits? (See the Internet-Drafts
>> Checklist        and http://www.ietf.org/tools/idnits/).
>> ...
> 
> As long as this effort is about WG document writeups to give the
> IESG information in more useful form, reviewing it with the WG
> Chairs list is entirely reasonable (although I'd be happier if
> the review included recent and prospective WG Chairs and
> Shepherds, I recognize there is no such list). But I think it
> would be extremely unfortunate if we found ourselves making
> policy that affects the whole community --and that should
> represent community consensus-- through the back door. 
> 
> I find the part of paragraph 8 quoted above particularly
> problematic.  
> 
> First, the nits-checker is an imperfect tool based on a
> collection of heuristics.  It works well for some documents;
> others completely confuse it.  If what the IESG really wants is
> a listing of what the nits-checker finds (if anything),
> annotated with what the WG wants to do about it or why the
> nits-checker finds issues, that is what you should ask for.
> Requiring that the  "document satisfies all ID nits" turns the
> nits-checker into a conformance enforcer.  Based on experience,
> that isn't what the IESG wants.  And certainly it would be hard
> to point to community consensus for that interpretation of the
> tool.
> 
> Second, no matter how much input they have gotten from either
> the IESG or this list, neither the list of things the nits
> checker looks for nor the checklist are, as far as I can tell,
> community consensus documents.  Most of their provisions come
> out of either community consensus document or RFC Editor
> requirements, but some do not.    We should be very careful,
> IMO, to avoid getting ourselves into a situation in which adding
> something to the checklist or nits-checker because they are good
> things to check and be aware of turns into a requirement on
> documents in the IETF Stream without first getting wide
> community exposure and, ideally, consensus.  I can live with
> making a highly-visible announcement and then treating silence
> as consent in situations like this, but (accidentally or
> deliberately) sneaking a new requirement in via the checklist or
> nits checker too closely resembles playing "gotcha" with WGs and
> document editors.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-proto-wgchair-doc-shepherding/history/

This question is unchanged from the document that passed IETF Last Call, except that the URL has been updated.  See (1.g) in RFC 4858.

Russ