Subject: [Tools-discuss] dead or alive?

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:33:25 +0900

Dear IETF Tools experts,

[If this is the wrong list, please tell me where else to go.]

Partly due to my own activity, partly due to the recent
copyright discussions, I have two drafts that were resubmitted
some weeks/months after having been expired:
draft-duerst-iri-bis and draft-duerst-mailto-bis
In the status tracker, the first appears as dead, the
second one is alive. See:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/idtracker/?search_filename=duerst

It seems that the reason for the difference is that the former
(now dead) one was in "AD Watching" before. It seems reasonable
that a resubmitted draft would e.g. go back to "exist" rather
than "AD Watching" after being expired for some time, but
having an existing draft in status "dead" really looks strange.

Regards,    Martin.

#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:[email-masked]

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:48:31 +1300

Martin,

If I recall correctly, resuscitation from "Dead" is only possible
as a manual operation requested by an AD. I think the idea is that
if a document has left "AD is watching" due to prolonged inactivity,
it should be a human, not a robot, who brings it back to the AD's
active list. At https://datatracker.ietf.org/idtracker/help/state/
you can see that the next possible state is "Publication requested".
So you need to write to the AD again.

None of this is a comment on your document, obviously.

   Brian

On 2009-03-11 15:33, Martin Duerst wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> Tools-discuss mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tools-discuss
>

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:26:18 +0900

At 12:48 09/03/11, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>as a manual operation requested by an AD.

Apparently, not so, as my second example (draft-duerst-mailto-bis)
shows. This is at "I-D Exists", at least according to
https://datatracker.ietf.org/idtracker/.

>I think the idea is that
>active list.

I fully agree here. If I were an AD, I wouldn't want an I-D to go back to
"AD is watching" without my approval. But there are many other states
available, and "I-D Exists" seems much more appropriate for the current
case than dead.

>At https://datatracker.ietf.org/idtracker/help/state/

According to the table, yes. According to the diagram
(https://datatracker.ietf.org/images/state_diagram.gif),
there is nothing after 'dead', which makes sense in the
usual sense of the word.

Also, according to the diagram, the only state from which to get into
'dead' is "DNP - announcement to be sent" (whatever that means).

According to the table, there are two more states from which to
get to 'dead': "Publication Requested" and "RFC Published".

In actual practice, potentially any state can be followed by 'dead',
possibly with the exception of "RFC Published" (which means
eternal life, rather than death, for an I-D :-).

In actual practice, a dead I-D should be allowed to get back to
the state it was in, or otherwise simply go back to "I-D Exists"
(which currently seems to happen for I-Ds that have been in
"I-D Exists", at least according to my own sample of one).

I'm not sure to what extent the above is a process issue, to what
extent it is a tools issue,... But I strongly feel that labeling
an actually existing document as "dead" is wrong, and

>So you need to write to the AD again.

Will do. This mail is more about trying to fix the problem in the
general case than about my specific draft.

Regards,    Martin.

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:44:46 +0100

> "I-D Exists", at least according to my own sample of one).

I agree that going back to "I-D Exists" would be much more logical
than "Dead"...  

The explanation here is historical: The database has two different
tables containing information about Internet-Drafts. All drafts have a
row in one of those tables.  When the web page says "state: I-D
Exists", it actually means that the draft does *not* exist in the
second table yet (and that's the table that actually has the "state"
field). If the draft is in the 2nd table, the value shown on the web
page is the value from the "state" field of that table. Currently,
"I-D Exists" is not one of the possible values for that field, so
once a draft is added to the 2nd table (by AD/secretariat), it can
never go back to "I-D Exists".

That's clearly stupid. There's ongoing work to redesign the database
schema (lead by Henrik), re-think the "state diagram" to better match
what happens today (I've been doing this, with input from rest of the
IESG), and update the code that uses the database (by various people),
but let's just say it might take a while before these are in use.

But help is welcome :-)
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tools-discuss/current/msg01752.html

Best regards,
Pasi

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:00:37 +1300

> I agree that going back to "I-D Exists" would be much more logical

Both of these states mean that no AD has this document on his
or her plate; but "Dead" means that it was previously added to the
IESG tracker by an AD. So there is a difference in semantics,
and there are in fact four states to consider:

1. I-D exists, and has never been considered by an AD
2. I-D expired, and has never been considered by an AD
3. I-D expired, and was previously considered by an AD
4. I-D exists (again), and was previously considered by an AD (but died)

Obviously, mapping these to two states (exists and dead)
plus a non-state is a problem. The non-state is that a draft
in state 2 (expired and never considered by an AD) simply
has no state in the IESG tracker.

Sorting this out would be a Good Thing.

    Brian

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:27:07 -0500

Did I understand Pasi's previous note in this thread to say that if all 
drafts had entries in the table that's used by the IESG tracker, all the 
cool things that work for these drafts (like having a page that shows all 
the versions of a draft, with diffs between each version, etc) would 
automagically start working?

If that's the case, this kind of sorting out could be a really good thing...

Thanks,

Spencer

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:31:15 +0100

Spencer Dawkins wrote:
> 
> Did I understand Pasi's previous note in this thread to say that if
> all drafts had entries in the table that's used by the IESG tracker,
> all the cool things that work for these drafts (like having a page
> that shows all the versions of a draft, with diffs between each
> version, etc) would automagically start working?

I guess you mean the pages on tools.ietf.org, like this one? 
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/tls/draft-ietf-tls-extractor/

They're more-or-less independent of the database and IESG tracker; 
I think the current logic is that all WG documents have such page
(even if they don't have entries in the second table -- for example,
the tls-extractor draft doesn't have an entry yet).

(But I'll be working on something related to this topic during
the code sprint -- let's see if I get something shipped :)

Best regards,
Pasi

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:04:26 -0500

Hi, Pasi,

Yes, exactly. Is it imaginable that individual drafts might also have an 
equivalent page?

Both inside and outside the IETF, I cringe when I send someone a link to 
draft-fred-grommet-03.txt when I know that link will be broken very soon. 
I'd much prefer to send a link to draft-fred-grommet and say "I'm looking at 
03, but if there's an update, you'll see it there, too".

Thanks,

Spencer

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 2:31 AM
Subject: RE: [Tools-discuss] dead or alive?

Best regards,
Pasi

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:09:12 +0100

Spencer Dawkins wrote:

> Yes, exactly. Is it imaginable that individual drafts might 
> also have an equivalent page?

Depends on Henrik :)

> Both inside and outside the IETF, I cringe when I send someone a
> link to draft-fred-grommet-03.txt when I know that link will be
> broken very soon.  I'd much prefer to send a link to
> draft-fred-grommet and say "I'm looking at 03, but if there's an
> update, you'll see it there, too".

Although non-WG drafts don't currently have draft history pages,
the permanent links (to the latest version) still work:

ASCII version:
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-dawkins-nomcom-dont-wait

HTMLized version:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dawkins-nomcom-dont-wait

Best regards,
Pasi

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:52:43 -0500

Hi, Pasi,

That is helpful. A draft history page would be even better, but the 
permanent links solve my biggest problems.

Thanks,

Spencer

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 9:09 AM
Subject: RE: [Tools-discuss] dead or alive?

Depends on Henrik :)

ASCII version:

HTMLized version:

Best regards,
Pasi

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:52:24 +1300

You can even get very cute:

http://tinyurl.com/numnum

   Brian

On 2009-03-13 03:52, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- From: <[email-masked]>