RE: Time commitments for MIB review

["Harrington, David" <dbh@enterasys.com>]

Hi Bert,

How about setting a minimum yearly commitment to remain a mib doctor?
I'm not sure how many mibs are produced yearly or how many mib doctor
reviews you want for each, but I see little problem with committing to
perform, say, six reviews per year.

I have concerns about a two-week deadline. My company pays my salary and
sponsors my participation, and often work due for the company must take
precedence over mib doctor reviews. I would have difficulty guaranteeing
a two-week turnaround whenever you want it. This is especially true for
mibs that had no mib technical advisor to ensure that a mib is not
poorly designed and then a huge poorly designed mib is presented for mib
doctor review. The mib doctor task for a mib that needs massive changes
is much more difficult than a review for a well-designed mib. The
Printer MIB jumps to mind, and recently the DHCP mib warranted a massive
overhaul.

I think the comparison to RTG may not be valid. Does the RTG directorate
perform review of large numbers of non-routing-related documents? While
mibs are surely NM-related, the thing being managed by a mib is seldom
an NM-related protocol. MIB Doctors need to have some understanding of
the management target, not just mib-writing skills, and that takes time
to develop. I think this is less of a requirement for the RTG reviews.

I have concerns about being "assigned" mibs. It is much easier for me to
justify the time to perform mib doctor review if it relates to my
company's business. I think I can better judge that than you. 

MIB Doctors often do mib reviews even before you ask, and often the same
mibs may be reviewed by multiple mib doctors, leading to some confusion
about who is "responsible" for doing the mib doctor review. Should we
have some type of volunteer registration mechanism to better coordinate
this? I would find it helpful (and I'm sure editors would too) to know
just who is "officially" responsible for reviewing which mibs.

A related concern is that the IETF has swung decidely in a
service-provider-focused direction over the past few years, and to a
degree away from non-SP-related IP-centric data networking technologies.
Are there patterns to the unclaimed mibs in your queue? Maybe you need
to recruit and train some new mib doctors with a more SP-focused
background.

I would also like to suggest that all WGs developing mibs should be
required to have a mib advisor to perform design reviews, to ensure that
the design is kept reasonable, and we should develop some BCP mib doctor
guidelines for this as well. A mib advisor should probably be limited to
maybe a one-year term, so they don't end up designing the mib themselves
and then performing design review as well.

dbh

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wijnen, Bert (Bert) [mailto:bwijnen@lucent.com] 
> Sent: Saturday, March 06, 2004 10:02 PM
> To: Mreview (E-mail)
> Subject: Time commitments for MIB review
> 
> Dear MIB Doctors,
> 
> - The IESG (in general) and I (specifically for MIB reviews) have
>   the experience that is we post a "who volunteers for review of X"
>   to the review-group (like mreview) mailing list, that that most
>   of the time does NOT work. Occasionaly it does, but not very often.
> - Asking someone specific to review does work better.
> - The RTG directorate has an agreement that the ADs can just assign 
>   a document to a specific member of the directorate and that person
>   is then responsible to respond with a review within 2 weeks.
> 
> So I am wondering if that RTG agreement could work for us as well.
> 
> I have a long backlog of MIB documents that need MIB Doctor review.
> Over the next week or so, I would like to start assigning documents
> to the various MIB Doctors to try and clean out that backlog.
> 
> Comments? Thoughts? Other ideas to make the MIB review process 
> go faster?
> 
> Thanks,
> Bert 
> 
>