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

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 14:08:37 +0200

Hi,

The tools team has been working on requirements for a tool
to automate submissions of internet-drafts, to replace the
current mail submission through the secretariat as primary
submission mode.

We've put together a -00 version of a draft containing the
requirements, and would very much like your input on this.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-tools-draft-submission-00.txt

We expect to issue a -01 draft in 1 (one) week, so your 
feedback should be in Friday, Sep. 18th, at the latest, in
order to be considered.

	Thanks,

		Henrik

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 15:05:00 +0200

I forgot to say:

Discussion of the draft should happen on the tools-discuss 
list, to keep the noise level down - subscribe at the 
following URL:

	Henrik

Henrik Levkowetz wrote:

> We expect to issue a -01 draft in 1 (one) week, so your feedback should 
> be in Friday, Sep. 18th, at the latest, in
> order to be considered.
> 
> 
>     Thanks,
> 
>         Henrik
> 
>

---

From: Cullen Jennings <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 09:36:06 -0700

I would like a requirement that all drafts that are submitted are close
enough to correctly formatted that they can reliably be printed without
weird pagination issues. I know this is a vague requirement but I imagine
folks know what I am getting at.

Also, an option of submitting the xml2rfc style xml seems like a very nice
way to generate meta information given the number of people that use that
tool for drafts. 

Cullen

PS. The archive for this list at
http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tools-discuss/current/maillist.html
seem empty

On 9/13/04 5:08 AM, "Henrik Levkowetz" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Ietf mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 21:38:40 +0200

> folks know what I am getting at.

Mmm, I'd also want this, but I don't think this is quite within the scope
of what the tools-team can require.  I'll suggest we capture this somehow
in the draft, and see what we can do to maybe get it into the I-D checlist.

There is still the issue of specifying this so it can be enforced - even
if _I_ know what you're getting at :-)  that isn't something that can be
built into a tool, as such ,:-)

> way to generate meta information given the number of people that use that

Yes, we intend to at least encourage people to do this.  There are some
issues though, mainly having to do with external files used for references 
- currently it is not a given that all xml files which work on the author's
system can be run through xml2rfc somewhere else without patching.

> http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tools-discuss/current/maillist.html

Yes.  I've sent a bug report on this.  The ftp arhcive at 
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/tools-discuss/current
seems to be updated (with some delay) though.

---

From: Tony Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 16:59:27 -0400

> folks know what I am getting at.

Not for -00 drafts. As long as they're strictly ascii, I personally 
could care less if the pagination of -00 drafts comes out strange; at 
least their content is still readable. However, I WOULD like to see them 
checked for non-ascii characters. Strange characters often cause 
problems for printing and their readability.

	Tony Hansen
	[email-masked]

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 04:48:43 +0200

Hi James,

On Monday, 13 Sep 2004, James Kempf wrote:
> There seems to be a built-in assumption here that someone will write a new
> tool for this.
> 
> Most conferences and journals nowadays use an automated submission system,
> I've heard there are 4 different systems used by various conferences. One of
> them I've used extensively is EDAS (http://edas.info/doc/) which was
> developed by Henning Schulzrinne. I'd be curious to know why something like
> that won't work for IETF? I imagine it might save IETF lots of time (and
> potentially money if the intent was to contract out the production of the
> tool), even if IETF had to change its procedures slightly. Has there been
> any attempt to compare the requirements in this draft to existing systems to
> see if IETF might get by with something that is already out there?

Excellent point.  There is no inherent value in rolling our own.  If we
can adapt an already existing system at a lower cost, it would most
probably be better.  We'll look at EDAS, and try to hunt down and look
at the other three out there, too. (If you happen to have names or URLs
for any of those, could you please send them to [email-masked]?)

	Henrik

---

From: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 15:55:15 -0700

Henrik,

            jak

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 05:08:30 +0200

Hi Tony,

> problems for printing and their readability.

... and this requirement is part of the ID-checklist, so here we're
closer to being able to ask that the submission conform.  Now, the
ID-checklist is really only placing requirements on I-Ds submitted for
RFC publication , and we can't willy-nilly just apply it to any
submission, but we can perhaps propose that a subset of it be applied by
the submission tool, with needed exceptions be handled by a fallback
mechanism.

	Henrik

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 18:39:48 +0200

Cullen Jennings wrote:

...
> There is this great tool called idcheck that you might have heard of ;-) It
> seems to do a good job of checking formatting - it could easily be run by a
> web submission process. Things that pass it, all seem to print fine for me.
> I don't know what it checks but I'm sure you know. (PS Thanks for the great
> tool)

You're welcome :-) (I did an overhaul of the boilerplate-matching code 
during the weekend, to make it recognise a family of not wellformed
boilerplate, exactly to make it more potentially useful as a potential
I-D submisson tool component.)

If they print fine when passed by idnits, I suspect it may be as simple
as the limits idnits enforces on line length and page length, which both
are covered in ID-cheklist.html - this is good news.

...
> yes, I like to use the xslt stuff because it is faster so I just don't
> include external references in all my drafts. I just cut and pasted the xml
> form the bib files into my draft. This ways it works for everyone. The ways
> stuff is included is current a bit of a hack - perhaps we could figure out a
> way to fix this problem.

Yes, I think so...  I'll post a note to Marshall, see what he says.

---

From: Cullen Jennings <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 08:00:52 -0700

---

From: Larry Masinter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 12:44:02 -0700

Personally, until XML2RFC came along, I almost always submitted
Internet Drafts as ASCII text without any pagination at all.

* The utility of pagination is low:

As long as there are section numbers, it's perfectly reasonable
and more useful to identify a sentence in a draft by section number,
paragraph number, and context, rather than by page number and
line number; in any case, such references work even when there
are multiple formats.

When internet drafts get turned into RFCs, the pagination changes
anyway, so it's not particularly useful for the submitter to
pre-paginate.

Most people have tools that will allow them to paginate
text/plain documents themselves, in a way that suites their
reading environment.

Pagination doesn't help reading ASCII text online.

* Pagination gets in the way:

If you're editing the text in ASCII with, say, emacs, the
pagination gets in the way, since the text editor won't
automatically adjust pagination.

If you're running diffs between one version and the next,
the pagination often changes, and the pagination changes
obscure the diffs display.

So I would like to see submission of ASCII text internet
drafts allow (and possibly even encourage) unpaginated text/plain.

Larry