At 9:06 AM -0500 1/17/06, Thomas Narten wrote:
This is probably getting beyond techspec, but over the years I have become increasingly uncomfortable with documents that are approved (i.e., in the RFC editor queue) but that are blocked on normative references. Some reasons include:- by definition, a document isn't complete without its normative dependences. One cannot properly evaluate it without its dependencies also being available for review. Indeed, in some cases, text changes are needed in a document if one of its normative dependencies changes. - documents in the publication queue that are blocked tend to get forgotten (by the WGs), reducing the pressure on getting the normative dependencies completed. (Indeed, we want the exact opposite!) - I think we'd be better served having the equivalent of a new ID tracker state called something like "approved, but blocked on normative references", so that the document is clearly not in the publication queue (yet).
Note that the first and third don't fully agree with each other. If we believe both of them (and I certainly do), the ID tracker state should prevent the IESG from evaluating the document. That is, there would be a pre-IESG-evaluation queue. Every document to be evaluated by the IESG goes into that queue, and leaves the queue when every normative reference is ready (which might be immediately).
There are a number of IESG folks on this list: does that sound reasonable? Or are there good reasons to evaluate documents before all their normative references are ready?
--Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium _______________________________________________ Techspec mailing list [email protected] https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/techspec
