Re: netwrk stuff

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On 12-jul-2006, at 19:36, Fred Baker wrote:

RFCs are published as Informational, Proposed Standard or Experimental. This represents the confidence level the IETF/IESG has at the moment of publication. Irrespective of I/PS/E, a document may move to Standard (which replaces Draft Standard and Internet Standard) or Historic if its implementation and deployment warrant this. The IESG publishes a short note explaining the rationale when changing designations.

Seems mostly reasonable.

I do believe that there is value in the BCP status, and would add it to the above.

Yes, that makes sense.

I would also argue in favor of the "Historic" status. Documents are rarely published as historic, although it has happened (RFC 1716). But they should be allowed to become historic at some future date.

Sure, I wasn't saying anything to the contrary, except that I didn't include publishing as historic, which I hope should be rare.

On 12-jul-2006, at 19:40, Pekka Savola wrote:

I'm not sure if Brian was serious about writing, as there are numerous proposals already [1], every one of them simplifying the current situation.

Yes, but spending tons of time in netwrk is exactly part of the problem. I took his talking about it in the plenary to indicate that a different way forward is desireable. That's why I posted just a few lines rather than read drafts and then write one of my own.

[1] hit 'newtrk' in I-D tracker [2]. My personal favourite is draft- atkinson-newtrk-twostep-00.txt, which seems to strike a good balance between stripping out useless process but keeping at least some features (revision based on implementation experience, etc.) which at least I have found useful.

Yes, there is a lot of good stuff in there, including the two-step standards track. Can someone explain the complexity in the tradeoffs between having one, two or three steps that was alluded to in the meeting?

However, the problem I have with that draft is that it still tries to formalize the progression of documents. We heard "declare success" a lot and "declare failure" once or twice tonight, and I'd like to take this opportunity to do both:

1. The internet works: success
2. Few specifications mature to Internet Standard: failure

Since the current rules prevented a lot of progressing of specifications but at the same time there doesn't seem to be a negative effect on the operation of the internet, it looks like these rules don't accomplish anything. So get rid of them. All of them. The IESG is full of smart people who are more than competent enough to decide on the fate of a document without a long list of rules to follow in doing this. When they get it wrong once in a blue moon, the last call and appeal processes should take care of that.

And while we're at it, let's cut down on all the documents that accompany the actual specifications. I'm not saying they're all worthless, but many applicability documents seem to exist because of formalities rather than because they contain crucial information that couldn't be put anywhere else. As a "user" of RFCs in the years before I got involved in the IETF I generally ignored these documents. The protocol specifications is where it's at. So extra documents when they add something, but don't require them.

Also, it's not by accident that people remember RFC numbers and not STD numbers. There is a big difference between implementing RFC 822 and implementing RFC 2822. Saying you have implemented STD 11 is useless because a year from now STD 11 may be something different than it is today, while RFCs 822 and 2822 will still be the same. That's why I think it's useful to have some IESG notes accompany each RFC. This can be a simple "updates XXX, obsoletes YYY, obsoleted by ZZZ" or more text that describes certain issues where required. This removes one or two layers of indirection in determining a document's status.

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