Network Working Group P. Hoffman
Internet-Draft VPN Consortium
Intended status: Informational October 18, 2010
Expires: April 21, 2011
Requirements for Draft Tracking by the IETF Community in the Datatracker
draft-ietf-genarea-datatracker-community-00
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 April 21, 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
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
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.
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft Datatracker Community Tracking Reqs October 2010
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1. Definitions Used in This Document . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2. Discussion of These Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. Requirements for Tools Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.1. Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.1.1. Requirement: Lists of drafts can be large . . . . . . 5
2.1.2. Requirement: A user can create multiple lists . . . . 5
2.1.3. Requirement: Some lists must be able to be private . . 5
2.1.4. Requirement: Specifying the drafts that are in a
list must be simple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.1.5. Requirement: Adding groups of drafts to a list by
attribute must be simple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.1.6. Requirement: Lists can dynamically include other
lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2. Notifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2.1. Requirement: Users can be notified when a draft
changes status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2.2. Requirement: Every list has Atom feeds associated
with it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2.3. Requirement: Every list has mail streams
associated with it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.2.4. Requirement: Notifications need to specify which
list caused the notification . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3. Display in the Datatracker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3.1. Requirement: Users can define how the rows are
sorted in a display . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3.2. Requirement: Users can choose which attributes to
display . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.4. File Output . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.4.1. Requirement: Users can get their current list as a
single file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Appendix A. Some Known Open Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft Datatracker Community Tracking Reqs October 2010
1. Introduction
IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a very early draft of a set of requirements.
It has gone through no general community review, and thus probably is
missing many 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 lists of drafts
that they normally follow. 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.
For example, 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.
Someone who cares about the DNS probably also wants to follow the
various drafts in different areas that affect the DNS. Developers
who are not active in the IETF process might want to follow drafts on
a particular topic to watch for things that might affect their
implementations.
This document describes the requirements for extending the
Datatracker for such capabilities. When complete, this document may
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft Datatracker Community Tracking Reqs October 2010
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.
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
process.
1.1. Definitions Used in This Document
o A "user" is an individual person who is member of the IETF
community. (Yes, that definition is purposely vague.)
o A "list" is an unordered set of filenames of Internet Drafts.
Lists are specified by users.
o 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.
o A "row" is a set of attributes about a single draft that is
displayed in the Datatracker.
o A "significant change in status" is all approvals and disposition.
In the current process for drafts in the IETF stream, "all
approvals" means "publication requested" "in last call" (this is
IETF last call, not WG last call), and "IESG evaluation";
disposition is "approved" (for publication as an RFC), "RFC
published", and "dead".
1.2. Discussion of These Requirements
[[ There is no mailing list for this draft at this time; one will
hopefully appear before the next version of this draft. ]]
There will be a BoF at IETF 79 in Beijing to discuss this draft. It
is currently being called "iddtspec", which somehow stands for
"Review of Datatracker Specifications to Follow Internet-Draft
Activities".
There is a plan to have one or two virtual meetings after Beijing to
discuss these requirements.
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft Datatracker Community Tracking Reqs October 2010
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: A user can create multiple lists
A user might have multiple areas of interest and would want to track
each area on a different web page. Another example would be a WG
chair who wants to track the drafts in his or her WG separately from
the drafts in a different area of interest. An IETF participant
might want to have a list of drafts that they are following closely,
and another list of drafts written by work colleagues.
2.1.3. Requirement: Some lists must be able to be private
Seeing a list of drafts that covers multiple areas of interest can
tell you something about the person who created the list. For
example, you might be able to guess that they might be looking for a
job in a different field by looking at their list of drafts of
interest. Of course, anyone can follow individual drafts today
without having that be exposed; however, following a particular group
of drafts can reveal information about a person.
Methods that might keep lists private include:
o The lists might only be available using passwords or some other
common authentication mechanism. This would require that the
Datatracker have a subscription process for users that could
assign passwords, and a per-user process for adding lists to a
user account.
o Lists might be assigned random URLs from a very large (2^128)
namespace, and the user who creates a list does not tell others
the assigned URL. This method makes it impossible for someone to
search the entire set of assigned lists. Given that the URLs for
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft Datatracker Community Tracking Reqs October 2010
lists are most likely going to be copy-and-pasted anyway, having
long random strings in the list's URL is not an impediment.
Note that some lists will purposely be made public, so there will be
two types of lists.
2.1.4. 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. There needs to be a mechanism that searches for
potential drafts by partial filename, by partial or full title, and
by author. 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.
2.1.5. 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 for creating 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
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft Datatracker Community Tracking Reqs October 2010
attributes every hour.
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.
2.1.6. Requirement: Lists can dynamically include other lists
If a user is authorized to see the contents of a list, he or she can
include that other list in a different list. When the referenced
list changes, those changes are also reflected in the referring-to
list; that is, if list A includes list B, and the set of drafts in
list B changes, the set of drafts in list A is automatically changed.
This feature is expected to be useful for experts (particularly WG
chairs) who create lists on topics that others might consider
interesting. For example, if Alice creates a list that contains all
the drafts that she thinks relate to TLS, and Bob has access to that
list, Bob can add that list to his personal list of things for which
he is interested. Bob might also create a list-of-lists about TLS
that includes references to Alice's list as well as to a similar list
that Eric put together.
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".
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.
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft Datatracker Community Tracking Reqs October 2010
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.
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.)
2.3. Display in the Datatracker
When a list is displayed to the user in the Datatracker's web
interface, each row represents a single draft. In a display, 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.
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.
When displaying a list, the Datatracker should allow easy sorting of
the drafts with the following collation orders:
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
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft Datatracker Community Tracking Reqs October 2010
o Date of most recent change of status of any type
o Date of most recent significant change of status
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.
Choosing which attributes should be displayed should be simple for
the user. Also, the user should also be able to specify the order in
which the attributes are displayed. The Datatracker should save the
last-chosen set of attributes for display with the definition of the
list.
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
o Associated AD
o Changed within the last 1 day
o Changed within the last 2 days
o Changed within the last 7 days
o Included list(s) which contain this draft
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. The "included lists"
attribute might show a pop-up with the names of the lists, given that
list names might be long.
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft Datatracker Community Tracking Reqs October 2010
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.
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft Datatracker Community Tracking Reqs October 2010
5. Acknowledgements
Early ideas used in this document were contributed by Russ Housley,
John Levine, Ray Pelletier, Blake Ramsdell, Julian Reschke, Yaron
Sheffer, and Andrew Sullivan.
6. References
6.1. Normative References
[RFC2026] Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision
3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, October 1996.
6.2. Informative References
[RFC4287] Nottingham, M., Ed. and R. Sayre, Ed., "The Atom
Syndication Format", RFC 4287, December 2005.
Appendix A. Some Known Open Issues
Given the very early stage of this document, there are actually many
more 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. Many of these topic were offered before the -00 draft
by early reviewers.
o One big feature that is desired is a way to say "tell me if this
draft does not change state in the next nnn days". This gives a
"dashboard" style capability. Doing this will mean holding more
state on the Datatracker.
o People get confused about the states of non-IETF streams (IRTF,
IAB, ISE). These should be covered explicitly. Also, need
definitions of "significant change in status" for the three non-
IETF streams.
o There will be an interesting and difficult interplay between
privacy and sharing lists. If someone shares a list, that person
doesn't want anyone modifying the contents of the list. So, there
might need to be "sharing a shadow list" or something similar.
o There may be legal issues with keeping user data private if we use
login accounts.
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 11]
Internet-Draft Datatracker Community Tracking Reqs October 2010
o Is there a formal definition for "drafts associated with a
particular WG"?
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 Should the file output be in all the interesting formats (XML and
JSON and tab-separated text) or just one?
o As people coalesce on requirements for display, maybe mock up some
HTML examples and put them in the document.
o Thought: add a button in the normal Datatracker output to add a
particular draft to a particular list.
o How prescriptive do we want to be? Should this say things like
"JavaScript pop-up" and "CSS" and such?
o Should paging be supported for long lists in the HTML display?
Author's Address
Paul Hoffman
VPN Consortium
Email: paul.hoffman@vpnc.org
Hoffman Expires April 21, 2011 [Page 12]