FW: RFC bandwith, packet size and latency

["Spencer Dawkins" <sdawkins@cynetanetworks.com>]

This posting just appeared on the problem-statement mailing list. It seems to confirm that there's actually a disadvantage to renaming an I-D when it's accepted as a working group deliverable (makes it harder to track how long things take in the IETF).

Have we ever identified an ADVANTAGE?

In the working group chair training sessions, Steve Coya just says that "working group deliverable" isn't based on the name of the draft (it's a separate field in the database). He doesn't encourage or discourage the name changes.

Henning also points out the difficulty this creates for IPR searches and suggests that the RFC Editor could tie the versions together. This solves the IPR problem if you get as far as an RFC...

Any thoughts on whether renaming drafts is worth the effort?

Spencer

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Henning Schulzrinne [mailto:hgs@cs.columbia.edu]
> Sent: Monday, January 27, 2003 8:57 PM
> To: Harald Tveit Alvestrand; problem-statement@alvestrand.no
> Subject: RFC bandwith, packet size and latency
> 
> 
> I've gathered some additional data on the RFC publication process and 
> imported the data into EDAS (a publication management system that I 
> wrote). The results are at 
> http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/internet/rfc.shtml
> 
> The results differ slightly from the earlier ones since I was able to 
> match additional RFCs by their I-D tag. However, the basic 
> gist is the 
> same and the trend has taken a large tick upwards in 2002: 
> the average 
> delay for RFCs published in 2002 was 2 years and 2 months. 
> (The maximum 
> was 5 years and 2 months!) As discussed in more detail on the 
> web page, 
> this estimate is likely low, since there seems to be an increasing 
> tendency in some working groups to let a draft go through a number of 
> draft-personal stages before becoming draft-ietf-wg. If the draft 
> changed its title during that time, I cannot match it and thus only 
> measure the time from draft-ietf.
> 
> As others have pointed out, it's amazing how painful 
> gathering this data 
> is. Since everything is in more-or-less random text format, with 
> occasional changes, parsing is prone to errors. I did a few sanity 
> checks, but this is a good project for a forensical statistician.
> 
> Also, in recent years, even the IMR is incomplete in its I-D list, so 
> that I have no data on a number of -00 records. This explains some of 
> missing data points (where the number of published RFCs is 
> much larger 
> than the number of measured RFCs).
> 
> It would be trivial for the RFC editor to gather the "first 
> draft" time 
> from the authors. (This would also be helpful for IPR issues.)
> 
> If somebody wants to play with the data, let me know and I 
> can give them 
> SQL access. (No, not Microsoft SQL...)
> 
> Henning
> 
>