On Thu, Jan 08, 2015 at 05:53:08PM -0500, William Atwood wrote:
> No, I don't have anything specific---my expertise is not in software
> evaluation. I was just concerned that Jeffrey's comment implied that 3
> Routing Area directors could solve this problem.
Note that I didn't say that a third AD will solve this problem. I referred
people to the discussion about the motivations for adding one.
In general, document review in IETF should follow a well defined process
similar to what is seen in many large software organizations:
- Reviewed by those working on it. (Authors)
- Reviewed by their peers. (Working Group)
- Reviewed by targeted experts, especially for cross-area work.
(Directorates)
- Reviewed for big-picture architecture. (IESG)
Where things have the appearance of breaking down is when there has been
insufficient review at the lowest layers. WG chairs should not send along
documents for directorate or AD review without having some certitude about
the document being of high enough quality to do so. In project management
parlance, they're the gatekeepers.
Yang modules, and MIBs before them, have a few interesting issues that
complicate the normal review process:
- Modeling as a discipline is something that not everyone is good at. IETF
tends to attract people who like working bits-on-the-wire, not management
and operations front-ends.
- The recognition and inherent rewards for participating in such models in
IETF lacks quite the same level of prestige from many people's
perspective. Basically, "it's not sexy".
- Review of models requires not only the depth of experience in the thing
being modeled, operations for that thing (which may not have practices if
it is new) but also strong familiarity with the modeling language and its
semantics.
+ Yang is new. That's going to cause some bumps as people learn.
+ As MIBs have demonstrated, sometimes it's less whether something is
syntactically or semantically correct, it's whether it follows a
best-practice style. Those styles are still evolving for Yang.
If the above hold true, the likely fixes are:
- Get many more people familiar with Yang.
- Make sure as best practices evolve that they are rapidly and widely
disseminated. (See rtg-yang-coord as one example.)
- Provide the same level of prestige for doing this hard work as for doing a
new protocol. "Egoboo"/"Karma" is a valid currency in volunteer run
organizations such as ours, even though most of our membership tends to be
sponsored via their jobs.
-- Jeff
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