Subject: Request for IESG processing of draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-10 for Proposed Standard

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 01:34:26 -0700

The USEFOR WG chairs are hereby requesting that the IESG review and 
process draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-10 for the status of Proposed Standard.

Below is some information about the document's state.

                   Harald & Alexey

1). Have the chairs personally reviewed this version of the ID
and do they believe this ID is sufficiently baked to forward to the IESG 
for publication?

Yes and yes.

2). Has the document had adequate review from both key WG members and 
key non-WG members?

Yes and No. External review has not been solicited.

Do you have any concerns about the depth or breadth of the reviews that 
have been performed?

No.

3). Do you have concerns that the document needs more review from a 
particular (broader) perspective (e.g., security, operational 
complexity, someone familiar with AAA, etc.)?

No concerns. This is a rather isolated field.

4). Do you have any specific concerns/issues with this document that you 
believe the ADs and/or IESG should be aware of? For example, perhaps you 
are uncomfortable with certain parts of the document, or whether there 
really is a need for it, etc., but at the same time these issues have 
been discussed in the WG and the WG has indicated it wishes to advance 
the document anyway.

No concerns regarding the document, however IESG should be aware that 
the document doesn't just standardize existing Usenet article format, 
but also adds several new header fields. This issue was discussed in the 
WG and rough consensus was to add new features.

The group feels that it would be most appropriate to have this document 
approved by the IESG now, but that publication should be delayed until 
the companion document (USEPRO) comes out. This might take a while, 
given the slow progress the group has made so far. In the event of the 
group closing, the document can be published without USEPRO - there are 
no normative references.

5). How solid is the WG consensus behind this document? Does it
represent the strong concurrence of a few individuals, with others being
silent, or does the WG as a whole understand and agree with it?

There is rough consensus among the 10 active participants to send the 
document to IESG.

Two WG participants have said that they think the WG should shut down 
and not send any document, citing the length of time it has taken to get 
here and concerns with the document quality.

6). Has anyone threatened an appeal or otherwise indicated extreme
discontent? If so, please summarize what are they upset about.

Nobody has threated to appeal.

7). Have the chairs verified that the document adheres to _all_ of the
ID nits? (see http://www.ietf.org/ID-nits.html).

Yes (Note that the ID nits tool reports several Experimental warnings, 
but they all wrong)

8). Does the document a) split references into normative/informative,

Yes

  and b) are there normative references to IDs, where the IDs are not 
also ready for advancement or are otherwise in an unclear state? (Note: 
the RFC editor will not publish an RFC with normative references to IDs, 
it will delay publication until all such IDs are also ready for 
publication as RFCs.)

This document doesn't have any normative reference to an ID.
There are three Informative references to IDs, two of them are working 
documents of the USEFOR WG
and another one (draft-ietf-nntpext-base) was approved for publication 
in June.

See above for discussion of the relation to draft-ietf-usefor-usepro.

9). For Standards Track and BCP documents, the IESG approval
announcement includes a writeup section with the following sections:

Summary

  This document specifies the syntax of Netnews articles in the context 
of the "Internet Message Format" (RFC 2822) and "Multipurpose  Internet 
Mail Extensions (MIME)" (RFC 2045).  This document obsoletes
the mesasge format parts of RFC 1036, providing an updated specification 
to reflect current  practice and incorporating incremental changes 
specified in other documents. The document also adds several new header 
fields that replace various non-standard and non-interoperable header 
fields in use in Usenet today.

 This is the first in a set of documents that obsolete RFC 1036. This
document focuses on the syntax and semantics of Netnews articles.

 Another document describes protocol issues of Netnews articles
independent of transport protocols, e.g. control articles.

 And yet another document describes policy related issues,
interoperability and usability related recommendations.

Process and goals history of this draft.

The USEFOR WG started its efforts to update RFC 1036 about 9 years ago. 
Several email related standards got published and updated in this 
timeframe.
Several WG chairs have changed since then, and many WG participants left 
or joined the WG (mostly left).

 In May 2004, this document was a part of the 98-page 
draft-ietf-usefor-article-13.txt. Following the proposal of Pete 
Resnick, WG chair at the time, the document got split into 2 documents: 
draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-00.txt and draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-00.txt.

Following feedback from the WG members, Alexey Melnikov asked Ken 
Murchison to edit draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-xx.txt instead of  Charles 
Lindsey, taking a more concise draft (draft-kohn-news-article-03.txt) by 
Dan Kohn as the base.
Ken Murchison became the primary editor, while Charles Lindsey and Dan 
Kohn got
listed as co-editors of the draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-00.txt  document.

While the split and new primary editor helped to move things forward, 
this was not sufficient to get the document finished.

In April 2005, Harald Alvestand joined as co-chair of the WG. He 
introduced issue tracker to the WG,
which helped to prevent people from reraising old issues again and 
again. He also on one occasion suspended posting rights of one of the 
abusive WG members, which helped reduce the personal attacks in the group.

draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-10.txt is the result of a WG Last Call in April 
2006 (which raised several issues, none of them requiring major changes) 
and a call for consensus on the resolution of Last Call comments in 
September 2006.

This draft is being submitted for Proposed Standard.

The USEFOR WG has reviewed the draft, last-call (and post last-call)
reviews included:
- Frank Ellermann
- Russ Allbery
- Richard Clayton
- Ralph Babel
- Forrest J. Cavalier III
- Seth Breidbart
- Dan Schlitt

Of the reviewers, two argued that the group should be disbanded and the 
draft ditched.