An Update on Milestones
draft-schinazi-update-on-milestones-02
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| Document | Type | Active Internet-Draft (individual) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Author | David Schinazi | ||
| Last updated | 2024-06-19 | ||
| RFC stream | (None) | ||
| Intended RFC status | (None) | ||
| Formats | |||
| Stream | Stream state | (No stream defined) | |
| Consensus boilerplate | Unknown | ||
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| IESG | IESG state | I-D Exists | |
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draft-schinazi-update-on-milestones-02
Network Working Group D. Schinazi
Internet-Draft Google LLC
Updates: 2418 (if approved) 19 June 2024
Intended status: Best Current Practice
Expires: 21 December 2024
An Update on Milestones
draft-schinazi-update-on-milestones-02
Abstract
As mandated in RFC 2418, working group charters currently contain
milestones. However, these milestones are often sufficiently out of
date that they no longer provide value. This document makes
milestones optional and allows more discretion on their dates. It
updates RFC 2418.
About This Document
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.
The latest revision of this draft can be found at
https://davidschinazi.github.io/draft-schinazi-update-on-milestones/
draft-schinazi-update-on-milestones.html. Status information for
this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-
schinazi-update-on-milestones/.
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at
https://github.com/DavidSchinazi/draft-schinazi-update-on-milestones.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 21 December 2024.
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2024 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components
extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as
described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are
provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1. Conventions and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Prior Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Update . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4.1. Optionality of Milestones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4.2. Optionality of Dates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4.3. Granularity of Dates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4.4. Date Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4.5. Ownership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4.6. Guidance for Chairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Appendix A. Alternatives Considered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
A.1. Do Nothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
A.2. Ensure Chairs Update Milestones . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
A.3. Improve Tooling to Automate Milestones . . . . . . . . . 7
A.4. Remove Milestones Entirely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
A.5. Rewrite RFC 2418 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
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1. Introduction
As mandated in Section 2.2 of [RFC2418], a working group charter
"enumerates a set of milestones together with time frames for their
completion". That document also leans heavily on milestones as a
process mechanism that dictates how a working group spends its time
and conducts its business. However, more than 15 years after the
publication of that document, the reality is often different.
Milestones are now commonly ignored, and often insufficiently updated
to the point of irrelevance. Since 2020, it has been possible for
some working groups to use dateless milestones (see [DATELESS]).
Since current usage has diverged significantly from the requirements
mandated by [RFC2418], we update that document to better match how
the IETF now operates. Making milestones optional allows removing
them from working groups that would otherwise perpetually have out-
of-date milestones, while retaining them when the chairs do keep them
up-to-date.
1.1. Conventions and Definitions
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in
BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
capitals, as shown here.
2. Prior Text
At the time of writing this document, the current normative language
around milestones is in Section 2.2 of [RFC2418]:
The working group charter MUST establish a timetable for specific
work items. While this may be renegotiated over time, the list of
milestones and dates facilitates the Area Director's tracking of
working group progress and status, and it is indispensable to
potential participants identifying the critical moments for input.
Milestones shall consist of deliverables that can be qualified as
showing specific achievement; e.g., "Internet-Draft finished" is
fine, but "discuss via email" is not. It is helpful to specify
milestones for every 3-6 months, so that progress can be gauged
easily. This milestone list is expected to be updated
periodically (see Section 5 of [RFC2418]).
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3. Issues
Milestones were designed as a tool to share information from the
corresponding working group to various interested parties. When
milestones are years out of date, they can no longer serve that
purpose. They can also cause harm if someone interprets them as
being timely when they are in fact out of date.
Additionally, the current datatracker tooling that allows dateless
milestones appears to be in violation of the RFC 2418 text quoted
above. While this is not a critical issue in and of itself, it helps
motivate updating RFC 2418.
4. Update
This documents updates the guidance in RFC 2418 in the following
ways.
4.1. Optionality of Milestones
Milestones are now optional, on a per-working-group basis. During
chartering, new working groups can now begin existence without
milestones. Once a working group is chartered, milestones can be
enabled or disabled without rechartering.
4.2. Optionality of Dates
In RFC 2418, milestones were associated with dates. In 2020, the
IESG ran an experiment that removed dates from milestones from some
working groups. This practice is now officially supported. When a
new working group is chartered, its milestones can be dated or
dateless. After chartering, changing whether dates are enabled does
not require rechartering.
4.3. Granularity of Dates
Milestones can carry dates, and those dates have a granularity.
Commonly, the dates have the granularity of a month. Other
granularities are possible, such as a quarter, a half-year, or an
IETF meeting. New granularities can be chosen by the IESG without
updating this document.
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4.4. Date Management
For each working group that has enabled dated milestones, the dates
can be configured to be modifiable either by the chairs, or by the
area director. This allows the area director to trust the chairs to
update dates without approval in those cases. The decision of who
manages change control for the dates lies with the responsible area
director.
4.5. Ownership
As was the case in RFC 2418, changes to milestones are subject to
IESG approval. In particular, whether a specific working group uses
milestones, whether they have dates, and the granularity of those
dates, is a decision made by the Area Director responsible for that
working group. Once made, these decisions need to be posted to the
mailing list of the corresponding working group.
The Area Director is encouraged to discuss these choices with the
working group chairs, as the success of milestones is predicated on
the chairs updating them in a timely manner. While it is expected
that this decision will almost always be made as agreement between
working group chairs and their responsible area director, in the case
of a disagreement the final decision lies with the area director.
4.6. Guidance for Chairs
For working groups where milestones are enabled, chairs are expected
to keep milestones up to date. Chairs are expected to review
milestones at least once per IETF meeting (every four months) to
ensure they are accurate.
5. Security Considerations
Readers of the datatracker REALLY SHOULD NOT make important decisions
based solely on the status of working group milestones as those could
be out of date.
6. IANA Considerations
This document has no IANA actions.
7. References
7.1. Normative References
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[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119>.
[RFC2418] Bradner, S., "IETF Working Group Guidelines and
Procedures", BCP 25, RFC 2418, DOI 10.17487/RFC2418,
September 1998, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2418>.
[RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8174>.
7.2. Informative References
[DATELESS] "wg-chairs list discussion: Milestones and dates",
<https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/wgchairs/
GKTCAy5As7czqteM-MlhqIvL2Ig/>.
Appendix A. Alternatives Considered
During discussions around this document, the following alternatives
were considered.
A.1. Do Nothing
As is often the case, the simplest path forward is to do nothing at
all. It has the advantage of requiring the least work, but the
obvious downside of not addressing the issues described in Section 3.
A.2. Ensure Chairs Update Milestones
One potential solution to the issue of out of date milestones is,
unsurprisingly, to update the milestones often enough. This solution
has the advantage of not requiring community consensus to update RFC
2418. Since working chairs serve at the discretion of the Area
Director, it is absolutely within the area directors' mandate to
request that chairs update milestones. However, since chairs are a
volunteer unpaid position, they might not always have the time to
fulfill all the tasks requested by their responsible area director.
The benefits of up-to-date milestones would need to demonstrated in
order to motivate their use.
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A.3. Improve Tooling to Automate Milestones
The overwhelming majority of milestones currently on the datatracker
are specific to a given draft. The datatracker even includes tooling
that allows attaching a draft to a milestone as an "associated
document". This tooling could be enhanced to automatically update
the milestone based on the status of the corresponding document.
However, this raises the question: if the relevant information is
already available in the datatracker, what is the purpose of
duplicating it in a milestone?
A.4. Remove Milestones Entirely
Another more drastic option would be to remove milestones entirely
from the datatracker, and update RFC 2418 to no longer mention them.
A.5. Rewrite RFC 2418
During the 15 years that have gone by since RFC 2418 was published,
many aspects of the IETF process have changed. At this point, some
portions of RFC 2418 now feel anachronistic. As a random example,
working group minutes are theoretically required to be encoded in
ASCII, and that almost never happens any more in order to allow using
the names of working group members that require different character
sets. Similarly, RFC 2418 still requires chairs to circulate an
attendance list (also known as the "blue sheets"), a task that has
now been automated.
While such small points do help motivate updating RFC 2418, it is
unclear if much larger changes would be beneficial.
Acknowledgments
Some of the contents of this document were inspired by a presentation
given by Adam Roach at the WG Chairs’ Forum at IETF 103 in November
2018. The author would like to thank everyone who commented on the
various email discussions about this topic.
Author's Address
David Schinazi
Google LLC
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
United States of America
Email: dschinazi.ietf@gmail.com
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