Network Working Group P. Hoffman
Internet-Draft VPN Consortium
Intended status: Informational December 20, 2010
Expires: June 23, 2011
Requirements for Draft Tracking by the IETF Community in the Datatracker
draft-ietf-genarea-datatracker-community-03
Abstract
The document gives a set of requirements for extending the IETF
Datatracker to give individual IETF community members, including the
IETF leadership, easy methods for tracking the progress of the
Internet Drafts of interest to them.
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
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on June 23, 2011.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2010 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
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
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include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1. Usage Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2. Context for This Document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3. Definitions Used in This Document . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.4. Expected user interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.5. Discussion of These Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2. Requirements for Tools Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.1. Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.1.1. Requirement: Lists of drafts can be large . . . . . . 7
2.1.2. Requirement: Every Datatracker user can create a
list . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.1.3. Requirement: Read-only views of private lists can
be made visible to others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.1.4. Requirement: The Datatracker must support optional
publicly-readable lists for WGs and Area Directors . . 8
2.1.5. Requirement: Specifying the drafts that are in a
list must be simple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.1.6. Requirement: Adding groups of drafts to a list by
attribute must be simple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.1.7. Tombstone: lists dynamically including other lists . . 9
2.1.8. Later Requirement: Users can add comments to say
why they added a draft or group . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.1.9. Requirement: These extensions must not make the
Datatracker take up too many resources . . . . . . . . 10
2.2. Notifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.2.1. Requirement: Users can be notified when a draft
changes status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.2.2. Requirement: Every list has Atom feeds associated
with it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2.3. Requirement: Every list has mail streams
associated with it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2.4. Requirement: Notifications need to specify which
list caused the notification . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2.5. Later Requirement: The tool must have instructions
on how to use it Atom feeds . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.3. Display in the Datatracker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.3.1. Requirement: Users can define how the rows are
sorted in a display . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.3.2. Requirement: Users can choose which attributes to
display . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.3.3. Requirement: Users can flag drafts with dates in
the future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.3.4. Requirement: Users can specify highlighting of
drafts with recent changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.4. File Output . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.4.1. Requirement: Users can get their current list as a
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single file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
6. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Appendix A. Possible Tracking of Non-draft Documents . . . . . . 15
A.1. Tracking RFC Status Changes and Errata . . . . . . . . . . 16
A.2. Tracking WG Charter Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
A.3. Tracking IANA Registry Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
A.4. Tracking Changes in Documents Outside the IETF Sphere . . 16
Appendix B. Some Known Open Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Appendix C. Differences Between -02 and -03 . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
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1. Introduction
IMPORTANT NOTE: This is an early draft of a set of requirements. It
has gone through one round of community review at IETF 79 in Beijing,
and thus probably is missing things that should be included, and some
of the things in this draft are wrong and will be changed in future
drafts. Nothing in this draft should be considered solid.
The IETF Datatracker is used by many IETF community members to find
the status of Internet Drafts (I-Ds) and view drafts that meet
particular criteria. The current Datatracker, found at
, allows anyone to search for active
I-Ds and get a list of drafts matching the given criteria. (The
Datatracker also allows for searching RFCs and expired I-Ds, but
those are not relevant to this discussion.)
Users can search in the Datatracker by the filename of the draft,
words in the draft's title, author, associated Working Group (WG) or
IETF area, the responsible Area Director (AD), or IESG status. The
returned list of drafts includes five columns: draft filename (with
an active link to an HTMLized version of the draft maintained by the
IETF tools team), the draft's title, the date it was submitted, its
status in the IETF process, and the responsible AD (if any). For
example, the output of a search in the current Datatracker can be
seen at .
Instead of using the search capability of the Datatracker to manually
find I-Ds of interest, users might want to create a list of drafts
that they normally follow. Some users will want to keep their list
to themselves, but others will want to allow others to view their
list.
Different users in the IETF community will have different ways that
they want to get information on draft updates and status. Many users
will want to be notified immediately, such as through an Atom feed
(see [RFC4287]) or automatically-generated email. Many users will
want to only find out about updates when they go to a web page. Many
users might want to get the data for a list as input to other tools.
And, of course, some users will want all three. All of these desires
are related to the overall desire to track drafts through their
lifecycle.
1.1. Usage Scenarios
The main motivation for these proposed changes to the Datatracker is
to allow a variety of potential users to be able to track drafts and
thus be better able to see when important events happen. A few
examples include:
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o A WG chair might want to keep a list of all the drafts from other
WGs that relate to active drafts in his or her WG.
o That same WG chair might want to help WG members be able to follow
the same drafts that he or she is following.
o Someone who cares about an established topic such as the DNS may
want to follow the various drafts that might make changes to the
DNS. This would include not only drafts that are in the many WGs
that directly are changing the DNS (DNSEXT, DNSOP, BEHAVE, and so
on), but also individual submissions, IAB drafts, and even IRTF
research.
o Developers who are not active in the IETF process might want to
lightly follow drafts on a particular topic to watch for things
that might affect their implementations.
o An IETF "regular" might want to follow parts of the process by
focusing on all the drafts that are being shepherded by a
particular Area Director.
1.2. Context for This Document
This document describes the requirements for extending the
Datatracker for such capabilities. When complete, this document may
be used to issue an RFP for the design and development of these
enhancements to the Datatracker. This document was prepared at the
request of the IAOC.
Some of the requirements in this document are listed as "later
requirements". This means that these requirements might not be part
of the first RFP for adding these enhancements.
The statement of work that led to this document says "The tools that
will eventually be provided to individuals in the community include":
o the ability to create one or more (possibly large) lists of I-Ds
that they want to follow
o the ability to get notifications when individual drafts from a
list changes state
o the ability to see all of the state changes that have occurred on
all the drafts in a list over a specified range of dates
o the ability to set the granularity of the changes (such as "every
change", "just approvals and publication", and so on)
o the ability to organize their views of a list in many fashions
that would be useful to different types of community members
o the ability to share and merge lists with other community members
Note that [RFC2026] describes the process that Internet Drafts go
through before they either become RFCs or are abandoned. The
Datatracker does not control this process: instead, it simply reports
on the current state of individual drafts as they go through the
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process.
During the early discussion of these requirements, some community
members proposed that it would be very useful to track other types of
documents, such as WG charters. Appendixes A through D list these
proposals. It is not clear currently if those sections will be part
of the initial deployment of the requirements in the main body of
this document.
1.3. Definitions Used in This Document
A "user" is an individual person who is member of the IETF community.
A "list" is an unordered set of Internet Drafts and groups of
Internet Drafts. Lists are specified by users. In some cases, the
authors are role-based, such as a WG chair being the specifier of the
list associated with that WG.
An "attribute" is a feature of a draft, such as its filename, its
current state in the IETF process, and so on. Attributes are usually
displayed as columns in the Datatracker.
A "row" is a set of attributes about a single draft that is displayed
in the Datatracker.
A "significant change in status" is all approvals and disposition of
the draft. Assuming that the changes to the Datatracker specified in
[WGSTATES] and [ALTSTREAMS] are made, "all approvals" means the
following:
o IETF stream: the WG states "Adopted by a WG", "In WG Last Call",
"WG Consensus: Waiting for Write-up", "Parked WG document", and
"Dead WG document"; the IESG states "Publication Requested", "In
Last Call", and "IESG Evaluation"
o IAB stream: "Active IAB Document", "Community Review", and "Sent
to the RFC Editor"
o IRTF stream: "Active RG Document", "In RG Last Call", "Awaiting
IRSG Reviews", "In IESG Review", "Sent to the RFC Editor", and
"Document on Hold Based On IESG Request"
o ISE stream: "Submission Received", "In ISE Review", "In IESG
Review", "Sent to the RFC Editor", and "Document on Hold Based On
IESG Request"
o All streams: in addition to the above, the disposition states
"Approved", "RFC Published", and "Dead" are also included
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1.4. Expected user interactions
When a user wants to follow a group of drafts, he or she goes to the
Datatracker and creates a new list. The requirements for lists are
given in Section 2.1. After a list is created, the user has three
ways that he or she might see when drafts in the list are updated:
o By going to the Datatracker page for the list (see Section 2.3)
o By subscribing to the Atom feed for the list (see Section 2.2.2)
in a feed reader that automatically fetches updates
o By subscribing to the mail stream for the list (see Section 2.2.3)
and reading the stream in their mail reader
1.5. Discussion of These Requirements
This document is being discussed on the datatracker-rqmts@ietf.org
mailing list. For more information, see
.
There will probably be virtual interim meetings to discuss this
document in early 2011.
2. Requirements for Tools Features
This section defines the requirements for the tool described earlier
in this document. The eventual tool, if implemented, may have more
features than are listed here; however, before this document is
finished, it should contain as many requirements as possible upon
which the IETF community can agree.
2.1. Lists
2.1.1. Requirement: Lists of drafts can be large
An active IETF participant might want to follow the status of
hundreds of drafts. For example, some ADs have 100 drafts in their
area, and they may also want to follow drafts outside their area that
affect documents in their area.
2.1.2. Requirement: Every Datatracker user can create a list
When a user gets a Datatracker account, that account comes with an
empty list pre-defined. The list can nomrally be modified only by
the owner of the account, although the Secretariat can also modify
the list as part of its support role for the Datatracker.
In order for this requirement to be met, it must be easy for any
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community member to get a Datatracker account. Account setup must
not involve any direct action on the part of the Secretariat.
However, the Secretariat will be responsible for support of
Datatracker accounts (lots passwords, odd interactions, and so on),
so this addition of more Datatracker accounts will potentially
increase the amount of work the Secretariat must do.
The only person who can edit the contents of a private list is the
person who knows the password to the account with which the list is
associated.
2.1.3. Requirement: Read-only views of private lists can be made
visible to others
Some users will want to make available a read-only view of their
list. Each private list will have a URL that leads to the
Datatracker view of the list; that URL must be able to be safely
shared with others. In this case, "safely" means "will not help
others be able to edit the list". Similarly, the Atom feed
associated with a private list should be able to be safely shared
with others>
2.1.4. Requirement: The Datatracker must support optional publicly-
readable lists for WGs and Area Directors
It is common in the IETF for users to follow the work of an entire
WG, not just individual drafts within a WG. It is also very common
that some work that is related to a WG happens outside the WG, either
in other WGs or as individual efforts. Many WG chairs monitor this
outside-the-WG activity for various reasons.
A smaller number of community members to follow an entire Area's
worth of topics. Again, these topics often happen within the WGs of
an area, but not always; for example, some topics related to the
Security Area happen in WGs in the Applications Area.
Because of this, it would be useful for community members to be able
to find a list which corresponds to the WGs or Areas in which they
are interested. The WG lists could be maintained by the WG chairs;
the Area lists would likely be maintained by the ADs. Note that such
lists are not mandatory; for example, a WG chair might not choose to
maintain such a list for a WG whose topic is extremely broad.
Both Working Group chairs and Area Directors currently already have
Datatracker accounts, so fulfilling this requirement only involves
associating those accounts with the role that controls the list.
Proposed later requirements include having the Datatracker list all
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of the publicly-readable lists (or certainly at least the ones
associated with IETF activities), and having links from WG pages in
Datatracker to the publicly-readable lists maintained by the WG
chairs.
2.1.5. Requirement: Specifying the drafts that are in a list must be
simple
When a user creates a new list, it must be easy to add individual
drafts to the list. This could be done using the Datatracker's
current search facility, and simply adding a "add to list" option for
Further, when editing an existing list, it must be easy to add
additional drafts, and it must be easy to remove drafts from a list.
2.1.6. Requirement: Adding groups of drafts to a list by attribute must
be simple
Drafts have many attributes, and some users might want to follow all
of the drafts that have a particular attribute. Some, but not all,
attributes have values that make sense in specifying lists. It
should be easy to add each of the following attributes when adding to
or editing a list:
o All drafts associated with an individual WG
o All drafts associated with all WGs in an individual Area
o All drafts with a particular responsible AD
o All drafts with a particular author
o All drafts with a particular document shepherd
o All drafts that have a reference to a particular RFC
o All drafts that have a reference to a particular draft
o All drafts that are referenced by a particular RFC
o All drafts that are referenced by a particular draft
o All drafts that contain a particular text string
These attributes are dynamic, and thus the list of drafts that have a
particular attribute will change after the user adds that attribute
to a list. The Datatracker should update lists with dynamic
attributes as often as is sensible for the server environment, such
as once an hour or more.
Note that some of these attributes are derived by programs created by
the IETF Tools Team that parse drafts and are therefore inherently
not completely reliable.
2.1.7. Tombstone: lists dynamically including other lists
Earlier versions of this draft had a requirement that lists needed to
be able to include other lists. While this may still be desired, it
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was decided that implementing this in a safe and understandable way
would be too difficult. Later versions of the Datatracker might
include this feature.
2.1.8. Later Requirement: Users can add comments to say why they added
a draft or group
In public lists, it might be useful for someone to be able to
understand why particular drafts and/or groups are added. Allowing
the user who put together the list to add a comment field would help
someone else see the motivation.
2.1.9. Requirement: These extensions must not make the Datatracker take
up too many resources
Currently, the only state that the Datatracker keeps for its users is
a very small set of attributes assigned to a username-password pair.
The extensions described here will cause the Datatracker to need to
keep more information, namely lists. Each list might have additional
associated state as well. This could lead to the Datatracker needing
a larger amount of storage and other resources. When this document
is near completion, it would probably be good to list exactly which
new state will be kept on the Datatracker server.
In order to reduce the chance that these extensions would strain the
Datatracker, some sort of denial-of-service prevention should be used
when the extensions are added. A later requirement might be to cull
lists if it seems that storing them on the Datatracker is taking too
many resources. The Datatracker can periodically send mail to the
user reminding them to delete lists that are no longer needed.
Culling presents a problem, however, for user-based lists that are
made public. The creator of a list might no longer be using it, but
others might be. Thus, it is likely that the Datatracker needs to be
be able to maintain lists long-term even if their creators are no
longer using them.
2.2. Notifications
2.2.1. Requirement: Users can be notified when a draft changes status
Some users do not want to go to the Datatracker's display page to
find out when a draft has been updated. Instead, they want to be
notified immediately after the draft is changed. The Datatracker
needs to support this type of immediate notification, where
"immediate" means "within an hour of a change to any draft in the
list". This requirement can be met with Atom feeds and mail streams,
as described in the next two sections.
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The Datatracker might create a generic "notifications engine" that
can be used to generate the Atom feeds and mail streams. This engine
can then be used to later add other notification types, such as a
Jabber feed.
2.2.2. Requirement: Every list has Atom feeds associated with it
The list will have two Atom feeds that are generated from the changes
to the list: one for every change in status, and another for
significant change of status. Each Atom feed will have a stable URL
that can be used by feed readers.
Many IETF users are already using Atom feeds created by the IETF
Tools Team for individual drafts. Using the new feeds for lists
described here will allow them to have better selection capabilities
to reduce the number of feeds they need to follow.
2.2.3. Requirement: Every list has mail streams associated with it
A user can subscribe to two email streams that are generated from the
changes to the list: one for every change in status, and another for
significant change of status.
Note that the mail streams are for each change; they are not batched
(such as one message per day). Users who want less frequent but
batched notifications need to use the Atom feeds instead of the mail
streams.
2.2.4. Requirement: Notifications need to specify which list caused the
notification
Users might have feeds and/or subscriptions to multiple lists. In
order to disambiguate duplicate notifications from multiple lists,
the body of the message in the Atom feed or mail stream needs to say
which list generated the notification. (Ideally, a user who wants
notifications will make one list based on multiple lists, but if they
subscribe to multiple lists, this requirement will at least suggest
to them that they want to limit their overlapping subscriptions.)
2.2.5. Later Requirement: The tool must have instructions on how to use
it Atom feeds
Even though Atom feeds have been around for years, they are new to
many Internet users, and even experienced users only know how to use
them in limited ways. The Datatracker should have at least a few
paragraphs explaining how the Atom feeds that it provides can be used
in different tools such as dedicated feed readers, online feed-
display services, and so on.
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2.3. Display in the Datatracker
2.3.1. Requirement: Users can define how the rows are sorted in a
display
There are many ways that a user might want to see the Datatracker's
HTML view of a list. For example, a user might want to normally see
it in alphabetical order by the drafts' filenames, but after the user
is of the net for a week, he or she might want to see the list in
order of changes of status so that those drafts changed recently
appear at the top of the list.
The default is to first list the groups first in alphabetical order
by group name, then individual drafts in alphabetical order by draft
filename. When displaying a list, the Datatracker should allow easy
sorting of the drafts with the following collation orders:
o Alphabetical order by group name followed by individual drafts
(default)
o Alphabetical by draft filename
o Alphabetical by draft title
o Alphabetical by associated WG
o Date of publication of current version of the draft
o Date of most recent change of status of any type
o Date of most recent significant change of status
In displays, a particular draft should only included once; for
example, if someone manually adds draft-ietf-cuteacronym-sometopic to
his list and also specifies that all drafts from the "cuteacronym" WG
are included in the list, that draft should only appear once in the
display. The column saying which included list(s) contain this draft
helps alleviate this loss of information.
The user might also want to group the files using the groupings in
the list, such as "all drafts from this WG" and "all drafts that
contain this word in the title".
The Datatracker should save the last-chosen sorting for display with
the definition of the list.
2.3.2. Requirement: Users can choose which attributes to display
There are many attributes that might be displayed, and different
users will have different information that they want to see. Also,
users will have different display technologies: someone might
normally use a web browser on a large screen, but at other times use
the browser on their phone.
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Choosing which attributes should be displayed should be simple for
the user. The Datatracker should save the last-chosen set of
attributes for display with the definition of the list. The default
is to display is draft filename, draft title, date of current draft,
status in stream process, associated WG or RG, whether it was changed
within the last 7 days, and included list(s) which contain this
draft.
The Datatracker should support display of the following attributes:
o Draft filename
o Draft title
o Date of current draft
o Status in the IETF process
o Associated WG or RG
o Associated AD, if any
o Changed within the last 1 day
o Changed within the last 2 days
o Changed within the last 7 days
There is some leeway for how the Datatracker might display these
attributes. For example, the "changed within" attributes might be
shown with a check mark or a colored box.
2.3.3. Requirement: Users can flag drafts with dates in the future
When tracking drafts, some users want to be able to say "tell me if
this draft has not changes state by a particular date" such as when a
draft is starting a two-week last call or a draft author has promised
a new version by the end of the week. This feature gives the user a
"dashboard" style capability.
For each draft in a list, the user should be able to set one date-
based deadline. When using the display version of the Datatracker,
if that date has passed and no change in status happened between the
time that the user set the deadline and the set date, the Datatracker
will highlight the deadline in red. It must also be easy to remove
these deadlines.
2.3.4. Requirement: Users can specify highlighting of drafts with
recent changes
The Datatracker cannot easily keep track of when a user last looked
at the page for a particular list. Thus, it instead needs to let a
user say which range of dates they are most interested in. To that
end, the user needs to be able to easily specify the amount of time
they consider recent, either as "the past nnn hours", "the past nnn
days", or "since this particular date".
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2.4. File Output
2.4.1. Requirement: Users can get their current list as a single file
Some users have their own tools for displaying and otherwise
processing lists of drafts. To make this easier, users should be
able to get a machine-parsable file that has a well-known format and
syntax that contains all the data that was used to create the current
display. The order of the records in the file is not important
because it is assumed that the user's program will sort the results
themselves. All attributes will be included because it is assumed
that the user's programs will only deal with the ones the care about.
When a list is marshaled into a data file, each record in the file
format represents a single draft. In a file, a particular draft is
only included once; for example, if someone manually adds
draft-ietf-cuteacronym-sometopic to his list and also specifies that
all drafts from the "cuteacronym" WG are included in the list, that
draft only appears once.
This feature will allow anyone to create mash-ups of their own and
create their own web sites based on the IETF data. This is
significantly easier than adding features to the Datatracker, and is
able to cater to narrower audiences.
The format of the file will be XML or JSON or tab-separated fields in
a text file. The decision on which format is supported will be based
on the desires of the community while discussing this document.
(Imagine how much fun that will be!) Regardless of the format
chosen, a syntax will need to be specified.
3. IANA Considerations
None.
4. Security Considerations
A tool for tracking the status of Internet Drafts can affect the
privacy of its users. The requirements for privacy of the
Datatracker views are discussed earlier in the document.
Web applications, particularly those that store data on a web server,
are a common source of security issues such as cross-site scripting
attacks. The tool described in this document might also use access
control for lists, and access control and authentication also cause
security issues if not implemented properly.
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5. Acknowledgements
Ideas used in this document were contributed by Scott Bradner, Leslie
Daigle, Spencer Dawkins, Aaron Falk, Russ Housley, Tero Kivinen,
Barry Leiba, John Levine, Henrik Levkowetz, Kurtis Lindqvist, Andy
Malis, Ray Pelletier, Blake Ramsdell, Julian Reschke, Jim Schaad,
Yaron Sheffer, Robert Sparks, Andrew Sullivan, and Sean Turner.
6. Informative References
[ALTSTREAMS]
Hoffman, P., "Data Tracker States and Annotations for the
IAB, IRTF, and Independent Submission Streams",
draft-hoffman-alt-streams-tracker (work in progress),
September 2010.
[CHARTERTOOL]
Hoffman, P., "Requirements for a Working Group Charter
Tool", draft-ietf-genarea-charter-tool (work in progress),
October 2010.
[RFC2026] Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision
3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, October 1996.
[RFC4287] Nottingham, M., Ed. and R. Sayre, Ed., "The Atom
Syndication Format", RFC 4287, December 2005.
[WGSTATES]
Juskevicius, E., "Definition of IETF Working Group
Document States", draft-ietf-proto-wgdocument-states (work
in progress), October 2010.
Appendix A. Possible Tracking of Non-draft Documents
NOTE: This is the first draft to include the functionality listed in
the next four subsections. Thus, it is not at all clear if any of
these will be a requirement, a later requirement, or a non-
requirement.
Further, even if one or more of these non-draft items is made a
requirement, it is not clear whether they will be included in the
same lists with drafts. That is, if tracking RFC status changes are
considered a requirement, it is not clear whether a user would
include the RFCs in a list that also contains draft, or whether they
would need to create two lists, one for drafts and one for RFCs.
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A.1. Tracking RFC Status Changes and Errata
The contents of RFCs never change after they are published. However,
that does not mean that nothing alters the meaning of the RFC. In
specific, an RFC can be updated or obsoleted by another RFC; also,
errata can be made against RFCs. A user who cares about the RFC
might want to know when these changes are made.
Currently, the only way for the Datatracker to see these changes is
by polling structured files on the RFC Editor site and parsing them.
A.2. Tracking WG Charter Changes
It will soon be easier to track changes in WG charters and
milestones; see [CHARTERTOOL] for more information. Someone
subscribing to the stream for a WG would be able to see each of these
changes. With the expected changes, the Datatracker would be able to
update WGs in a list without any polling.
A.3. Tracking IANA Registry Changes
Developers may need to get values from IANA registries for their
software/hardware implementations. They might want to know when the
registry changes, such as additional entries or updates to current
entries. Thus, being able to be notified when a registry changes
would be valuable to them.
Adding this functionality may be tricky for some registries. For
example, if a developer cared about DKIM signature tags, they would
have to subscribe to
which (currently)
covers a handful of registries, all related to DKIM. Thus, a change
to the DKIM hash algorithms would trigger a message showing that the
registry had changed, even though the DKIM signature tags registry
had not.
A.4. Tracking Changes in Documents Outside the IETF Sphere
Users might want to track documents that relate to IETF activities
but are produced by other standards development organizations (SDOs)
such as the W3C, the IEEE, the Unicode Consortium, the ITU, and
others. In order for the tracker to track these documents, it would
need to poll occasionally and possibly scrape listings from HTML.
Appendix B. Some Known Open Issues
Given the early stage of this document, there are actually many more
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open issues than are listed here. This list is mostly meant to
remind the author of topics that need to be updated in future
versions of the document, and to spur readers to think of even more
open issues.
o There may be legal issues with keeping user data private if we use
login accounts.
o When an AD agrees to sponsor an individual submission, does the
Datatracker consider that draft associated with the AD? If not,
that needs to be dealt with here.
o Thought: add a button in the normal Datatracker output to add a
particular draft to a particular list.
o If the Datatracker contains private information (that is still to
be seen), that private information needs to be invisible in lists
so that it is not accidentally exposed.
o Should "significant change in status" be judged by the list
creator, such as by a series of check boxes for every possible
status change?
o Idea for a later requirement: A list creator can add comments
about who might be interested in following the list.
o It should be easy to remove items from list in the Datatracker
display.
o If the agendas for an upcoming meeting are scraped for draft
names, it would be possible to add an attribute to a draft that
lists that WG agenda(s) on which it appears.
o Make it possible to add all drafts that have a certain section to
a list (non-trivial IANA considerations, ASN.1 modules in
appendicies, ...).
o In 2.1.6, add "All drafts that are referenced by any draft on list
XXXX"
o Another possible stream: liaison statements.
Appendix C. Differences Between -02 and -03
Made the number of lists per person from "many" to "one". This was
done throughout the document, but is particularly apparent in 2.1.2.
Resolved the "private or anonymous" question by making lists private,
based on ownership of a Datatracker account. This primarily affects
2.1.3, which now also covers the requirement that private lists also
have a public read-only component. This change assumes that private
lists are a requirement.
Talked more about role-based lists, particularly in 2.1.4, making all
those lists publicly-readable.
Got rid of the requirement that lists can dynamically include other
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lists, making 2.1.7 a tombstone. Also modifed 2.2.3 and 2.3.2
because of this change.
Added two new open issues ("all drafts referenced by another list"
and "liaison statements stream").
Author's Address
Paul Hoffman
VPN Consortium
Email: paul.hoffman@vpnc.org
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