[Iccrg] Submitting draft-irtf-iccrg-cc-rfcs-01 for IRSG review

[Michael Welzl]

On Fri, 2007-05-25 at 15:58 +0300, Lars Eggert wrote:
> On 2007-5-25, at 0:20, ext Michael Welzl wrote:
> > Any other concerns?
> 
> Gorry's email made me take a look at -01, which I hadn't read yet.
> 
> I was OK with -00, which was basically a straightforward survey that  
> categorized and summarized existing RFCs. (I didn't think that a  
> congestion control survey was the most important thing for ICCRG to  
> be working on, but if people were willing to put in the effort, that  
> was fine by me.)
> 
> I do think that the new text in -01 is a bit problematic. Looking at  
> the diff [1], several new paragraphs were added that go beyond what  
> I'd expect in a survey. The new text comments and sometimes even  
> speculates on the usefulness, applicability or deployment status of  
> the surveyed RFCs and IETF efforts. It does so without citing  
> sources, and seems to reflect the personal opinion of the authors.

We included the additional text in response to feedback
that we got from the list.

Clearly, our goal was not to provide biased viewpoints,
but rather to provide information which is valuable,
yet is not contained in the documents that we list, just
to give some more context to the whole thing. Here's
an example:

--
At the time of this writing, the IETF's TCP Maintenance and Minor
Extensions Working Group (TCPM) was developing an update to RFC 2581  to
clarify and revise some points. These included the definition of  a
duplicate ACK, initial congestion window and slow start threshold
values, behavior in response to retransmission timeouts, the use of  the
limited transmit mechanism, and security with regards to  misbehaving
receivers that practice ACK division.
--

I think that this information is useful, and you won't
find it by going through the RFCs that we list.

Therefore, I think that we'll just have to go through the
new statements one by one and fix the problem. May I therefore
ask you to tell us which parts exactly you disagree with?


> Even though I personally agree with some of those statements, I'm  
> worried that there doesn't seem to have been any public discussion on  
> them in the ICCRG or the wider transport community. Or, for that  
> matter, a discussion on whether the ICCRG wants to change from  
> publishing a survey of congestion control RFCs to publishing a  
> commentary on such RFCs, which the changes from -00 to -01 have  
> resulted in.

It's not supposed to be a commentary - we just wanted to give
some context, as in the statement above. If we accidentally
wrote anything that represents our personal viewpoints rather
than useful facts, I'm sure that I can speak for Wesley too
when I say that we'd happily agree to remove it.

Cheers,
Michael