John,
That's news to me: I can't recall any recent discusses calling for operational experience before publishing as Proposed Standard. Some years ago, there was such a requirement for Routing Area, but that was declared obsolete. (In actuality, there seems to still be a somewhat informal requirement to document implementations for _some_ Routing Area documents, but it is not by IESG direction.)
AFAICT the IESG is not setting any requirements like this. We are careful about documents stating correctly what their limitations or not so well understood areas are. And sometimes a working group may decide that they do not want to forward a document for publication until it has some operational experience. But as a general rule the IESG is not demanding this.
I don't want to say that we would never do it for any document, however. I remember a recent case were one AD wanted operational experience on a new, relatively complex design. Other ADs pushed back and the document was approved without that experience. However, there might be cases where we should have that experience. One case that comes to mind is draft-ietf-intarea-ipv4-unique-id which among other things does an Update: 791 and we would never do that without years of very widespread experience.
In short: its a judgment call but generally speaking the IESG does not require operational experience for PS.
Jari _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf