Call for final Paces for consideration: deadline imminent

[Paul Hoffman <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings again. And, thanks again for all the work people did on the 
last work queue rotation. We now have the end of the format draft 
squarely in sight.

The WG still has a bunch of finished Paces that have not been 
formally considered, a (thankfully) much smaller number of unfinished 
Paces, and a couple of promises that "I'll write that up as a Pace 
soon". We need to finish soon in order to make our milestone, and I 
believe we can do so gracefully.

On Monday, Feb. 7, the Working Group's final queue rotation will 
consist of all Paces open at that time. Any Paces that have obvious 
holes in them ("to be filled in later", "more needs to go here", 
etc.) will be ignored. We have had over a year of time here, and many 
weeks since the previous attempt to close things out. On Monday, Feb. 
14, we will assess WG consensus and ask the document authors to put 
together a final draft.

Note that this is not the last opportunity for work on the Atom 
format. For one thing, there are plenty of non-core extensions that 
folks have been mulling over; having the core draft finally finished 
will help those to emerge. Further, we need to do the final work on 
the protocol document. Also, during the formal IETF Last Call, 
discussion of the format draft will be welcome from everyone 
(including people who have not read any of the earlier drafts).

Please do *not* rush out to write a Pace unless it is for something 
that is *truly* part of the Atom core, and you really believe that it 
is likely that there will be consensus within a week. If your idea is 
appropriate as an extension, or is for something that is quite 
similar to something else that has explicitly gotten lack of 
consensus, please do not write a Pace. In the former case, please 
hold your extensions for a few weeks; in the latter case, please 
recognize that asking the WG to focus on something that they don't 
want will likely cause us to do a worse job at carefully reviewing 
things that we all want.

So, if you have an incomplete Pace now, you have a few more days to 
complete it. Of course, everyone should feel free to continue talking 
about the current Paces now, and to continue to suggest editorial 
changes to the current Internet Draft.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium