RE: New work items

[Ross Callon <rcallon at juniper.net>]

> > If the group can't get its currently chartered multicast work
> > completed in more than five years then why should we charter
> > additional multicast work?
>
> Could you point to the particular sentences in the charter that 
> distinguish what you call the "currently chartered multicast work"
> from the "additional chartered work"?

The current 5+ year old charter is indeed rather vague regarding what multicast work is needed (or was anticipated as needed 5 years ago). This is something that would have been nice to have fixed long ago. Given that the future work of L3VPN is likely to be largely on multicast, it would be desirable to figure out what future work we can currently anticipate is wanted and get the charter updated. Of course we are not likely to be perfect in terms of anticipating what we are going to want to do in the future, and will most likely need to recharter again some day. 

> If you cannot do so, then one might conclude that the new work items
> that have been suggested fall under the existing charter and no 
> rechartering is necessary.  One might also conclude that the WG is
> nowhere near completing its chartered work.

I suppose that the IDR charter could be re-written to say a very simple "work on BGP enhancements forever". This would be a pretty accurate top-level description of what IDR does, and might not be all that different from the L3VPN WG's charter's current description of multicast work. However we generally try to be more specific that that.

> > Clearly more than six months have passed since the Dublin IETF.
> > However, very considerable work has been completed since then
>
> This isn't really accurate.  The work that was recently submitted
> to the IESG was substantially completed before that time.  Since
> then, there was some review during WG LC, but that was substantially 
> completed early in 2009.

I agree that the recently submitted work was mostly completed by you and others many years ago. The main thing that has been accomplished since Dublin on the two recently submitted documents was to get WG consensus to go ahead and publish them (with some additional review). The agreement to publish the documents is a big deal. 

Ross