On 5/24/24 10:41, Rob Wilton (rwilton) wrote:
I am not familiar enough with IDR's history to have any opinion of whether it worked well in that case, or how applicable their experience might be to email.Perhaps the proponents for the WG looked at what IDR was doing, thought that seems to work well, and they should try something similar here? I.e., there does seems to be some supporting analysis that this approach may work well for mature, widely deployed technologies. Is there any recent evidence that this approach has been tried and hasn’t worked?
(I do, however, have several decades' experience with "experiments" in email...and their mixed results.)
But equally, maybe this feedback would have been better during the community review phase in April, i.e., BEFORE the WG was chartered?
These days the IETF conversation is so fragmented that it's too
hard to keep track of everything, like an endless game of
whack-a-mole. But that's a separate problem.
I.e., the premise here seems to be that this is such a terrible precedent that the IESG should ignore the normal rules and process for chartering the WG and make up some new ones on the fly that allow the charter to be modified after the WG has completed all the steps specified in the process. This hardly feels justified in the case where we don’t actually know that the current charter is a problem, only a supposition that it will be.
There's also only a supposition that the current charter is a
good idea. The stated justification for the implementation rule
is flimsy at best, the requirements are extremely vague, there's
no actual defined evaluation of the results, etc.
I can’t see why the best option here isn’t just to try it out and see what happens. If the requirement turns out to be too restrictive then the WG can always be rechartered to tweak the process or remove it altogether. But I’m not even convinced that there will even be an issue here at all ...
It takes years to understand the results of such decisions, especially if there's not any plan to measure them or even agreement on what they'd mean.
And I'm not inherently opposed to a bit of improvisation now and
again, but let's not kid ourselves... this isn't an experiment in
any rigorous or useful sense.
Keith
