¶ BGP Directorate
The BGP Directorate assists the ADs by raising the quality of BGP specifications before they are submitted to the IESG for publication.
This group is not an IETF Working Group and does not produce documents that are part of the IETF Standards Process.
¶ Charter
BGP Directorate reviewers assist Area Directors, Working Group chairs, and document authors with documents containing BGP-related content.
See Charter
¶ Personnel
¶ Objective of Reviews
The reviews shall primarily focus on core BGP protocol, implementation, and deployment aspects. Some of these aspects are:
- Neighbor FSM
- Protocol messages, encoding, update packing, parsing and similar considerations
- Changes to or impact on BGP decision process
- Error handling and fault management (in the letter and spirit of RFC7606)
- Design of new attributes (including new types of communities)
- Scalability, performance and robustness
- Security implications
The above is NOT a checklist and may be expanded by the BGP Directorate team. Checklists may be prepared by the BGP Directorate, WG chairs and the WGs to aid document authors as well as WG members in general.
Where possible, the reviews SHOULD cover the specific feature/extension/technology aspects. However, with the widespread use of BGP, it is not expected that every reviewer is an expert on all those different usage. The intent is to focus on the common and core BGP aspects.
For issues identified, the reviews SHOULD suggest fixes or alternates. However, this may not be always possible due to various reasons and reviewers are not obligated to suggest text or become shadow authors/contributors.
Finally, the WG that produces the documents is expected to have the expertise on the subject matter and its WG members are responsible for the reviews and quality of their products. The BGP Directorate's function is only complementary to this core WG responsibility.
¶ Links to templates from WGs
¶ IDR Templates
¶ Process
BGP Directorate only performs Early Reviews for BGP-related documents (i.e., before WGLC). Last-Call or Telechat Reviews may be only requested by ADs in exceptional cases. Please ensure that the document is ready from the following aspects before requesting reviews:
a) It is a WG adopted document
b) The document is complete/ready for implementations (and ideally before code points are allocated and implementations begin)
c) All major sections are complete beyond just the techncial procedures, encodings, etc. (i.e., IANA considerations, security considerations, and operational aspects are also covered)
The objective is to be able to update documents early in their development based on review feedbacks.
Review requests will be generally raised by WG chairs of the WG that the document belongs to. In exceptional cases, the BGP Directorate chairs/secretaries or ADs may also request.
