RE: Target times for MIB Doctor Review

["David B Harrington" <dbharrington@comcast.net>]

Hi,

I don't agree with
> Perhaps there should be mechanism where a standards-track document
> automatically becomes an informational (or even historic :) document
> if the authors do not followup on IESG/AD/... comments withing a
given
> time period once a document is in the IETF publication machinery.

Many people don't care about the status of an RFC, as long as it is an
RFC. Look at RFC3164 for example; there are a number of vendors
touting they have an RFC3164-compliant implementation of syslog. But
RFC3164 is an Informational document that only "describes the observed
behavior of the [BSD-style] syslog protocol"; it is not an IETF
standard specification, and it turns out that many implementations of
BSD syslog are totally incompatible except that their messages start
with a <PRI> field.

Having a poorly-written standards-track MIB module to be published as
Informational or Historic RFC is much simpler for authors than meeting
the rigors of passing MIB Doctor review. 

Ahhh, the time that could have been saved in the Bridgemib WG.and the
RMONMIB WG and the ... ;-)

David Harrington
dbharrington@comcast.net

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-mreview@ops.ietf.org 
> [mailto:owner-mreview@ops.ietf.org] On Behalf Of Juergen
Schoenwaelder
> Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 2:50 PM
> To: Wijnen, Bert (Bert)
> Cc: Mreview (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: Target times for MIB Doctor Review
> 
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 03:32:51AM +0100, Wijnen, Bert (Bert) wrote:
>  
> > So the suggestion is that we would like to have a target of MIB
> > Doctor review to be done within 30 days of the request.
> > 
> > I want to hear from you how to deal with that?
> 
> What does this include:
> 
> a) The time it takes to find a MIB reviewer
> 
> b) The time for the initial MIB review
> 
> c) Followup discussion and re-review time
> 
> I assume it is a)+b) but I am not really sure. If it is a)+b), then
I
> think it really matters what the distribution of a) looks like. If
30
> days is meant to be just b), then I would say this is fine as a
> timeout.  However, no review in case of a 30 days timeout is not
> really useful.  One could easily abuse this mechanism by making your
> friend a reviewer of your document, who will basically do nothing
> until the timer expires.
> 
> For me as an occasional reviewer, it seems that I spend most of the
> time on c) rather than b) and typically c) happens with much delay
and
> rather unpredictably after b) so that in many cases I have swapped
out
> things completely. So from this perspective, I think it would be
nice
> to have a deadline by which authors have to followup on MIB reviewer
> comments. It is odd that sometimes after a review you wait months
for
> something to happen again. I know, this might not be the IESG's time
> tracking problem to optimize - I am just mentioning here since it
has
> something to do with the happyness of a MIB reviewer.
> 
> Perhaps there should be mechanism where a standards-track document
> automatically becomes an informational (or even historic :) document
> if the authors do not followup on IESG/AD/... comments withing a
given
> time period once a document is in the IETF publication machinery.
> 
> /js
> 
> -- 
> Juergen Schoenwaelder		    International University Bremen
> <http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/>	    P.O. Box 750 561, 
> 28725 Bremen, Germany
> 
>