Re: thoughts on documentation reuse.

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

>>>>> Ayers, Mike writes:

>> I think we should investigate whether we can make the standard
>> process work faster for these things before we go to IANA. Some
>> things we can do:
>> 
>> (a) Use individual submissions to avoid charter discussions and
>> working group activation.

Mike> 	I don't like this.  The first thing that comes to mind: how do
Mike> we maintain the document after the train hits you?

WGs come and go. Document editors come and go. I fail to see why this
is a problem. If a document is worth to maintain, then someone will do
the work. If nobody cares to do the work, then probably the document
is not worth it.

>> (b) Work hard with the ADs to figure out how we can update MIB
>> documents without destabilizing them on the standards
>> track. Putting additions into separate modules just for this reason
>> is IMHO broken since it forces MIB readers to deal with all the
>> fragemented MIB pieces. (The inverted stack table of the IF-MIB is
>> a good example for this.) I would like to have a process where I
>> can publish a MIB fragment (more or less a patch) that goes into an
>> existing MIB module.

Mike> 	I feel your distaste for the practices that have sprung up to
Mike> deal with the current situation, but I think that rapid updates
Mike> of RFC MIBs will not solve the problem - I suspect it will
Mike> create worse problems than those it is intended to solve.

I did not talk about "rapid updates". But I guess we all know too well
that all software artefacts require some maintenance from time to
time. Right now, we do not have a mechanism in place which allows us
to do that at reasonable costs.

<soap>
It is sometimes interesting to look at the release cycles of other 
organizations. <http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/history.pdf>
shows milestones of some management technologies and it looks like
the IETF is getting slower while the others are getting faster.
Perhaps (a) the IETF has so many smart people to get things right
early on or (b) other organizations prefer to just fix the bugs 
while the IETF just claims there are none. :-)
</soap>

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder    <http://www.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/schoenw/>