Subject: [Tools-discuss] Re: I-D submission tool draft

From: Alex Rousskov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:00:09 -0600 (MDT)

Hi,

 	I am catching up on tools-discuss e-mail. It turns out that 
TOOLS members were not auto-subscribed to receive postings...

scott bradner wrote:
> this seems to have taken the approach of taking a fully formed ID 
> text and trying to parse and check it, not an unreasonable approach 
> but was the alternative of having the submitter fill in some or all 
> of the meta data on a submission form (authors names & contacts, 
> filename, boilerplate options etc) considered?

As Henrik already pointed out, both modes are supported. However, if 
the submitter manually enters or corrects any meta-data, the draft 
MUST be posted manually, via Secretariat. This way, Secretariat can 
check that manually entered meta-data matches the draft. The tool will 
tell Secretariat what has been changed or added, making Secretariat 
work easier and more reliable.

I think it is a bad idea to let folks change meta-data and auto-post 
drafts that may not match the meta-data any more (more on that below). 
Auto-changing the draft to match manually-entered metadata does not 
seem practical to me for many reasons.

After the initial discussion, would anybody prefer a different choice
here?

Jari Arkko wrote:
> - I'm not sure the correct metadata & go to manual process
>   option is useful. Is there some reason why we can't require
>   either that (a) the draft be corrected so that the metadata
>   can actually be read, or that (b) the user fills in the
>   metadata and then we do the automatic publish operation
>   anyway?

Option (a) is not always possible. We simply do not have the tools to 
_correctly_ extract metadata from any valid draft. Our tools can only 
handle draft formats they know and often rely on imprecise guesses. 
Since draft formatting requirements are very informal, we will not 
have perfect tools in the foreseeable future (if ever).

Option (b) is likely to lead to many inconsistencies and even fraud. 
If the tool cannot extract meta-data from the draft, then it cannot 
check that corrected meta-data matches the draft. Let Secretariat 
handle these special cases. Please note that since manual posting 
takes longer, folks will be encouraged to use xml2rfc and other 
"common" formats to avoid manual processing. This is a good thing, I 
guess.

scott bradner wrote:
> I think that this process is missing a chance to deal with one of the
> confusions about the IETF's process - if the submission process included
> a click-through agreement covering the IPR (copyright & patent
> disclosure) requirements it would eliminate any possibility for the
> submitter to claim that they did not know or for the submitter to say
> that some other text in the document negates the boilerplate

A part of the submission mechanism is a submitter verification step. 
For example, an e-mail can be sent to submitter asking him to confirm 
submission. That would be a good opportunity to confirm IPR consent.

Thank you,

Alex.

_______________________________________________
Tools-discuss mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tools-discuss

---

From: [email-masked] (scott bradner)
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 13:02:41 -0400 (EDT)

> seem practical to me for many reasons.

I'm in full agreement

Scott