Re: Proposed Standard and Perfection

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>>>>> "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.






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