> It is NOT OK to tell anyone that they should not contribute a draft - because > it may muddy the water > or for ANY other non-technical reason. Individual drafts or desire to request > WG adoption do not change > this. I do not ever want to see or hear something like this on an IETF > mailing list.
Let me defend Acee here a bit and try to chart a course a bit more down the middle. When a WG has an effort underway that is intended to lead to a WG document (and that is what I read the current "design team" effort to be), it is IMO often not helpful to have yet more IDs submitted on the same topic. Rather than complementing the existing work towards a concensus result, additional IDs can be a distraction and require folk to spend time figuring out how the other ID relates to the WG effort. I.e., it's much more constuctive to say "here is what is defficient in the current model, and here is what I think we should do instead". It is much less constructive to have a standalone ID that (probably) overlaps with the other IDs and doesn't focus on the *differences* from the other work that already has a head start. It is the case that the IETF mantra is "submit a draft", but frankly, I think that is a bit of a sound bite that we would do well to not spit out as often as we seem to because it too often misses what really should happen, namely, how best to contribute to reaching consensus in a WG. We have a huge problem today where there are overlapping/competing drafts that WGs have to sort through. And in many of those cases, additional IDs have very little additional content than what already exists. But since we go around telling folk to "submit an ID", we shouldn't be surprise that we get them beyond the point of diminishing returns. (And I am NOT saying that the draft at issue here is one of those.) In this case (and I personally don't have any skin in the game), it seems to that both parties are making honest efforts to do the right thing, but unfortunately, the state of play was not fully known to all. > Very very few drafts start perfect and different models have > different perspectives. The IETF has a consensus process, as you > well know of course, to resolve differences between perspectives and > drafts. I didn't hear anyone say that consensus has already been called. My take away is that we have a WG making an honest effort to move forward in a particular direction and it is doing exactly what it should be in terms of getting behind a design team effort. And IMO, once you have a WG design team working on an effort, having others submit drafts in the same space is not always what we should be encouraging people to do. Does that mean we should not allow additional IDs? Of course not. Does it mean we won't look at them and give them consideration"? Of course not. But we should also be honest that if a WG has an official document or has a DT working on a document, having additional "competing" documents show up is often not the most constructive way to contribute. Unless news IDs really are clear about how they relate to the other efforts and what those other efforts are lacking. Thomas _______________________________________________ i2rs mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/i2rs
