USEFOR status

The USEFOR IETF working group adopted my new Netnews protocol draft as the new working group draft going forward at the end of last month, and I put in another substantial chunk of time responding to mailing list messages and issues raised with it. Now, it's time to polish it up for last call, which means we've switched to a more formal discussion system. From this point on, protocol changes will only be made in conjunction with issues tracked in RT. This way, the working group chairs can call consensus on the issues and I'll update the draft according to their call, which lets me have my own opinion independent of being the draft editor.

I'm seeing if I can find the time to continue as draft editor. I'm trying to limit my involvement to two hours a week (although so far it's been more like five) given all the other things I have going on. As anticipated, we're now getting into the period where the people in the working group who favored the previous draft's style and position are raising as issues all the things that I intentionally changed, so the discussion is a bit tedious. I'm trying hard not to repeat myself and to stay out of the discussion once I've said my bit.

One serious problem for the working group is lack of participants. Right now, Charles and I are the most frequent posters, and since we want very different things from a Netnews protocol specification, that's not that useful. Frank mostly agrees with Charles in trying to push policy into the specification (in my opinion). The rest of the working group comes down on the other side of that question in polls of the whole working group, but they're mostly not participating in the threads. I'm not sure how we're going to deal with this going forward.

Anyway, right now, the chairs haven't had time to start turning threads into issues yet, so I only have two minor wording changes accumulated for this weekend's batch of updates (and in one of them we're still bickering over the wording).

I'm considering posting to news.software.nntp to mention that we're starting to do more work and faster work again, and now's the time for people who dropped out to turn up and listen in, particularly if they know how news software works (and ideally have written some).

Posted: 2007-01-11 20:32 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04