On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 11:16:14AM +1200, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > > Actually, no. It only reflects consensus to work on the topic with > draft in question as a basis. It does not imply that the WG will > reach rough consensus on the draft. It is not uncommon for adopted > drafts to fade away, fail to reach WG Last Call, or fail to reach WG > consensus after WG Last Call. As Martin says downthread, it's only > when the draft is sent off to the AD that we can be sure that the WG > chairs have called consensus. It should also be noted that not all I-D's are proto-RFC's. There are cases, in more complex protocols, where an wg I-D might contain some secondary text that might explore potential (non-normative) use cases, or possible alternate approaches (which if adopted might replace several sections or subsections of the primary I-D), etc. In those cases, the I-D introduction would explain what the purpose of that I-D might be, and in the end, some, all or none of that text might *ever* show up in a published RFC. Perhaps that's less common now, because people can just throw up that sort of thing on their blog, or a medium or substack post, etc. But I think there is value, if there is a document that is useful to the working group's consideration, for it to be posted as an I-D for that working group, without any kind of presumption that it's going to end up as a standard or some other kind of RFC. Other standard groups (the T13 ZONE DOMAINS effort was my most recent experience of this) have similar types of never-intended-to-be-normative documents used in the process of the work of standardization, so this is by no means unique to the IETF. Cheers, - Ted
