Paul Hoffman wrote:
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).
Actually, this state does exist in the RFC Editor queue now,
under the name of MISSREF. There's been some debate whether it's better
to have it where it is (head of line) or at the tail of the edit queue,
but there it is. (Also see Potential Req-STATUSTRK-2.)
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?
I think that would remove potential parallelism and would therefore be
a Bad Thing. It's perfectly reasonable to evaluate a draft knowing that
some of its normative dependencies are still being refined; generally
speaking an AD won't bring a draft forward until the dependencies
are getting ready to be ready.
Brian
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