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Re: Wordsmithing Party?
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 17:32:15 -0500 (EST)
From: Ben Rogers <ben@Ascend.COM>
Would it be useful to have a "Wordsmithing Party" at the LA IETF?
Interested parties could come with their marked up versions of the
drafts (or have these presented via a proxy if attendance is
impossible). The goal would be to clean up the text as much as is
possible in one fell swoop, and provide a quick and simple outlet for
many people's frustrations without making any functional changes to the
documents. The modified drafts could then be presented to the list
immediately following the meeting and given to the IESG soon afterwards.
This would serve as a last call for semantic changes, so further
discussion would be drastically reduced.
At some point, as the saying goes, we need to shoot the engineers and
ship the product.
These drafts have been delayed for a very long time, and they are very,
very, late. It is unfortunate --- and frustrating --- that people
aren't bothering to read these documents until the very late minute. My
concern is that no matter how long we delay publication, there will also
be "one more word-smithing suggestion".
In the mean time, we are suffering from not having a stable
specification to code from, and we are also delaying other groups such
as the IP Compression group, whose documents are blocking on ours.
It's important for people to remember that the documents don't have to
be perfect before we go to Proposed Standard. We can fix editorial
changes at the Draft Standard stage, and even before we go to Full
Standard.
Bob Moskowitz is planning on setting up a web page where the
clarifications to the specification can be collected both for the
convenience of implementors and so we can make sure we get all of these
fixes into the second revision of these documents. I believe that's
probably the best place to put these sorts of editorial changes.
- Ted
References: