Subject: [Tools-team] Re: draft-ietf-tools-notification-01.txt

From: stanislav shalunov <[email-masked]>
Date: 26 Jan 2005 16:34:19 -0500

Joel,

Thank you for your input!

As part of this message, I am sending a quoted copy of your message to
the tools-team mailing list, without your explicit permission.  It
seems that, since your message contains nothing of personal or
controversial nature, this should be acceptable.  If you really meant
to keep your comments private, I apologize.

"Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]> writes:

> If I am reading this right, it neglects one important class of
> transition which has an implication for the scheme.
> Documents transition from being personal I-Ds to WG I-Ds.
> This may be coupled with a name change.
> If I am tracking a document, and its name changes, I would like to
> still be getting notifications about the document.
> 
> It may be that we will conclude that the tagging has to change when
> the name changes, and that therefore we can not provide this aspect
> of the service.  We should at least state that limitation.

It is my understanding that such a transition is always coupled with a
file name change, sometimes coupled with a change of the title and,
perhaps, the set of authors, and might well be coupled with textual
changes.

The draft currently has this on transition from personal to working
group documents:

   Occasionally, personal drafts are republished as working group
   drafts.  In this case, since heritage can be partial and ambiguous,
   the new working group draft MUST be treated by the notification
   service as a completely new document.

Should I explain the limitation further in the text or should I
address it?  I really think there's a judgment call as to whether the
document is ``the same'' in case of republishing.  Computers are bad
at judgment.  I could add a special event type REPUBLISHED-AS-WG-I-D
that would alert the subscriber that a new draft that's in some sense
a continuation of the personal one is available.  The generation of
the event would still require some human intervention.  Would this be
good?  Not enough?  Too much?

-- 
Stanislav Shalunov		http://www.internet2.edu/~shalunov/

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about
telescopes."					-- E. W. Dijkstra

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---

From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 16:47:28 -0500

(No problem with the forwarding to the tools team.  I should have sent my 
note there myself.)

The fact is that the transition from personal to wg draft is much more 
common than than the text you quote indicates.  My own guess is that the 
bulk of wg IDs begin life as personal drafts.

If we are going to treat this transition as producing a completely new 
draft, we should make very clear that simply getting notifications about a 
personal draft will not tell the watcher about the transition, and that 
notifications will simply stop when the change occurs.  (Unless one is also 
watching all drafts for the relevant working group.)

This is probably the best we can do for now.
Yours,
Joel

---

From: stanislav shalunov <[email-masked]>
Date: 26 Jan 2005 17:06:36 -0500

> This is probably the best we can do for now.

Well, we could insert provisions to do better in the future, with a
special event type as I described in my previous message.  Events of
this type would probably not be generated in the first phase of
implementation, and would probably require human intervention even in
the future.  (How else would the system guess that
draft-ietf-XXX-YYY-00.txt is really a continuation of
draft-ZZZ-YYY-17.txt?)

I recognize that it'd be desirable to be able to follow the same
document easily.  That's why this draft is written.  The problem is
that currently, there's no good way to learn that republished drafts
are actually ``the same.''

I'm inclined to include the new event type and describe what to do
about it, but not discuss its generation.

                                                        --Stanislav

P.S. I changed the word ``occasionally'' to ``frequently'' in that
paragraph.

Antibiotics comprise 2% of cow feed in U.S. feedlots, by weight.

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:46:00 +0100

note about existing practice:

occasionally the secretariat gets a message (I'm not sure how they get it) 
that one draft obsoletes another, as marked in the file listing all the 
internet-drafts.

In that case, a notification service could do either or both of:

- give a "final" notification that the old draft has been obsoleted by the 
new one
- automatically add all watchers of the old draft to the new one.

--On 26. januar 2005 16:47 -0500 "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> draft, we should make very clear that simply getting notifications about
> a personal draft will not tell the watcher about the transition, and that
> notifications will simply stop when the change occurs.  (Unless one is
> also watching all drafts for the relevant working group.)
>