From: Dan Schlitt (schlitt@world.std.com)
Date: Fri Nov 29 2002 - 09:25:04 CST
What this working group needed was not another one of these "straw polls."
Past experience is that they lead exactly nowhere. It is a well
established IETF principle that correct engineering decisions are not
arrived at through voting.
In my observation of other working groups it is not the function of the
document editor to determine group consensus. That is the duty of the
group chair. Based on the discussion on the mailinglist the chair should
suggest what the rough consensus is and gather the reaction of the
mailinglist to that suggestion. Objections should be serious technical
points that deal with the workability of the proposal.
But this working group has never worked that way. It suffers badly from
lack of leadership. It is fortunate that usenet is no longer of serious
importance to Internet anymore. It works "well enough" the way it is.
Kent Landfield made a suggestion back in September on how to move things
forward. It was ignored. The working group continued to thrash.
Perhaps the most useful thing the group could do would be to prepare a
document to be classed as historic rather than proposed standard.
/dan
--Dan Schlitt schlitt@world.std.com