Subject: [Tools-discuss] I-D names in milestones

From: "Dan Wing" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 11:01:37 -0800

There must be a historic reason that I-D filenames are not put into working
group's milestones.  However, as both a chair and a contributor, and I find it
difficult to correlate some milestones with some I-Ds.

A quick solution is to add the filename to the milestone,

  "Submit an Informational document on tea prices in China,
draft-ietf-tea-prices-china"

A more involved solution is to have the working group's charter page include a
hotlink to the specific draft, simliar to what is done in the Internet-Drafts
section and in the Request For Comments section.

Any thoughts on this, or am I in left field with my confusion?

-d

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 09:52:15 +1300

> difficult to correlate some milestones with some I-Ds.

I don't think you can assume a 1:1 correspondence between
milestones and drafts, and also the milestones are formally
approved by the AD (and initially by the IESG), at a time
when the I-D may not even have a name.
> section and in the Request For Comments section.

We could certainly suggest to the secretariat that when a draft name is
included among the milestones, it should be automagically converted
to a link.

    Brian

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From: "Dan Wing" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 13:08:37 -0800

> milestones and drafts,

I am not aware of an exception to a 1:1 correspondence.

Certainly, if there is a 1:N correspondence (where N>=1), 
that could be handled as well.  In fact, due to the significant
preponderance of the 1:1 correspondence, it would be helpful
if it was more obvious to WG contributors that multiple I-Ds
are related to a single milestone.

> and also the milestones are formally

Um, sure.  But that is a short amount of time.

But at some point a document is created to correspond to
the milestone.  When that occurs, we have no record of it,
and folks are stuck with guessing, doing human pattern
matching of filenames and titles, etc.

Groups with many active milestones would especially benefit
from this.  For example, take a look at
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/sip-charter.html and consider the difficulty
in determining which document might be related to "MIME body handling in SIP
to IESG" -- you can't tell if there is a working group document
(draft-ietf-sip-*) or if it's a milestone with some waiting-in-the-wings
contending individidual documents, or what.  A simple "No WG document" would
sure be helpful in this case (assuming my research is correct and the MIME
document is not, in fact, adopted by the WG yet).

-d

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 22:03:37 +0100

> I don't think you can assume a 1:1 correspondence between

That is, indeed, even worse of a problem than the one Dan correctly  
identified.

> when the I-D may not even have a name.

Probably the assignment of I-D names to milestones should be done by  
the WG chairs (I don't think there is a need for AD/IESG involvement).
WG chairs already have a reporting scheme for the milestones, why  
don't we simply report the draft names as well?

Gruesse, Carsten

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From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 10:12:27 +0200

> difficult to correlate some milestones with some I-Ds.

You're not the only one. I had a fun week trying to figure out which  
milestones correspond to which document when I took over my current  
set of WGs, especially for cases where the charters had become, um,  
stale.

If there is a draft (or multiple drafts) associated with a milestone,  
the name should be included. We haven't been good about this. We've  
been better about including the intended status of a draft in the  
milestone, because that's typically also not recorded elsewhere.

Better tools support for milestones is pretty high on my wish list.  
For example, I'd be great if the WG status page would flag drafts that  
are past their milestones, etc. Something for the code bash...

Lars