Subject: [Tools-discuss] Providing data on I-D progression

From: "Brian Rosen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 08:27:28 -0400

One of the things we keep harping on is how long it takes to get a draft
into an RFC.  Of course that begs the question of how long does it really
take?  We now have ways of measuring progress when a draft reaches the IESG,
but no way to track before then. One of the reasons is that drafts
frequently change names.

I wonder if we could arrange to insert a token of some kind in drafts which
we allow authors to copy as we progress a draft.  The basic idea is that a
real, no predecessor -00 draft gets a new token, and that token is repeated
in any subsequent drafts.  If two drafts are split or merged, tokens follow.
A merge would result in a document having more than one token.

We would need a function to generate a token, a way to put the token(s) in
the draft that a tool could find, and a tool to capture the path of the
token through the process.  I would think that we could write a very simple
rule set for how you manipulated the tokens, and we advertise that because
each draft author gets to decide himself whether a new token is needed, or
an old token is copied, when an -00 draft is generated, that the statistics
we get are subject to varying interpretation of that guidance.

I think a meaningless string is the best token.  You could use a date and a
sequence number, but that might lead to someone altering the token.  A
simple "tracker-token=" just after a CRLF would be enough.  We could get
some xml2rfc help perhaps.

Brian

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 09:50:12 +0200

Brian R,

Automating this seems like a good idea, but authors can already
tell the secretariat that draft-foo replaces draft-bar, and this
is represented in the tracker today.

Wouldn't a sequence of Replaces: tags be even better, because
a human reader could interpret them too?

My ambition is that the tracker should really be available to WG
chairs as an active tool, which would mean quite a lot of extensions
to support states and actions during WG processing. The "ID exists"
state conceals a lot of substates.

    Brian C

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From: Brian Rosen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 10:24:41 -0400

While I agree that there is value in a Replaces tag, I wonder if it 
suggests that the value is the immediately preceeding draft name, which 
might make it harder to create the data.  It would need more complex 
instructions.  Still, might be better than my token.  Consider whether 
merge makes sense, for example.

Having more state is a good thing.  Having more data is even better.

Brian