From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 14:40:18 CDT
Henry Spencer <henry@spsystems.net> writes:
> Consensus does not mean that everyone agrees, only that the bulk of the
> group agrees.
Yes. And I don't believe that this is the case for this group. It may be
the case among the people who have remained on the mailing list, but isn't
the case if one includes all the people who have already left in disgust
at the process followed.
Things *have* improved notably over the past year or so, in that we've
stopped adding more completely untested ideas to the draft and even taken
a few out, and it's close enough that I'm no longer convinced that
approving the current draft as is would cause significant harm, but it's
still not something I would be pleased to call the next revision of the
news article standard or something that I think belongs on standards
track.
The major question in my mind at the moment is whether I have some
plausible belief that one could do better.
> That's why the IETF has procedures for sorting this kind of thing out --
> so that people who are persistently out of step with mainstream opinion
> do get heard but don't indefinitely stall the whole standards process.
Right, which is why I have some hope that at least some of this will be
corrected at the IETF level.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>