YANG and the IETF

I have quite some experience with requirements discussions in the IETF and in particular with requirements discussions about network management data modeling languages and from my personal experience I can tell you that this is all a waste of time. These discussions will not bring us any closer to a decision about the direction. The only thing is that the list of requirements grows in each incarnation of this requirements collection process by some say 40 new requirements.

If it takes three attempts to get the the approval from the IESG/IAB to discuss a solid proposal addressing an obvious need, backed up by major implementors of the technology concerned and an open source implementation of the proposal to get a BOF while there is nothing of comparable detail out there, then something seems to be odd.