With regard to maintenance, the two areas I am most active in each have
enough maintenance that having one WG for all the maintenance (in each
area) simply would not work. IDR, LSR, and MPLS for Routing. 6man
(which is even named as a maintenance group) and DHC (and probably even
some of the others) in Internet.
Yes, the IETF used to have a policy against long lived working groups.
We found it didn't work.
Yours,
Joel
On 1/28/2021 11:22 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
On Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 7:05 PM Fred Baker <fredbaker.ietf@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:fredbaker.ietf@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
So voila! IPv4 has existed more than ten years, so we don’t need it
any more... Also DNS, DHCP, TCP, Ethernet, SMTP - wow, that rule
really clears the deck. And heck - even IETF chairs produce internet
drafts.
Quite. This leads me to re-suggest a proposal I have made from time to
time which is that every area have a DISPATCH working group and every
area also have a maintenance group.
This has (sorta) happened in security with LAMPS. Faced with the need to
update cipher suites across the board, a new WG was formed which has
been tweaking every protocol in active use not in active development.
The objection generally raised is of course that this allows people to
'mess' with existing protocols adding features that shouldn't be there.
But that objection presupposes that the job of the IETF is to control
permission for permissionless innovation.
One of the reasons some WGs linger is that their function requires
continuous tweakage, GSSAPI/KITTEN being an example. Better to have one
WG with the purpose of lingering than four lingering past their sell-by.
