>>>>> "Eliot" == Eliot Lear <lear@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
Eliot> Sam, As the person who most recently complained, let me
Eliot> elaborate on my comments. The problem I believe we all are
Eliot> facing is that the distinction between Proposed, Draft, and
Eliot> Internet Standard has been lost.
Eliot> I agree with you 100% that...
>> The point of proposed standard is to throw things out there and
>> get implementation experience.
Eliot> But when it comes to...
>> If specs are unclear, then we're not going to get
>> implementation experience; we are going to waste time.
Eliot> We disagree (slightly). In my experience one needs to
Eliot> actually get the implementation experience to recognize
Eliot> when things are unclear. And my understanding is that this
Eliot> is precisely why we have PS and DS.
>> I've had a lot of experience with a rather unclear spec with
>> some significant problems that managed to make its way to
>> proposed standard: For the past 10 years I have been dealing
>> with problems in Kerberos (RFC 1510). This leads me to believe
>> very strongly that catching problems before documents reach PS
>> is worth a fairly high price in time.
Eliot> We come to different conclusions here. My conclusion is
Eliot> that no standard should remain at proposed for more than 2
Eliot> years unless it's revised. Either it goes up, it goes
Eliot> away, or it gets revised and goes around again.
It's been under revision for all of that time.
Eliot> Your fundamental problem with RFC 1510 is that it is too
Eliot> painful for people to go and fix the text. And that's a
Eliot> problem that should be addressed as well.
nWell it certainly has been painful but because of a number of false
steps and to some extent because of WG management issues, it has taken
10 years, not 2 years to revise RFC 1510.
we might have gotten it down to 7 or 8 by fixing the WG management.
Eliot> Thus, let the IESG have a bias towards approval for PS, and
Eliot> let implementation experience guide them on DS and full
Eliot> standard. But set a clock.
It's in significant part because I think a lot of things may take more
than 2 years to revise understand and fix that I believe this approach
is wrong.