On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 10:37:03PM -0500, James M. Polk wrote: > I'm not in love with the 3 maturity levels, especially when I was asked > by an AD during Maastricht to provide proof of 2 independent > implementations just to have an ID I was presenting be considered to > become a WG item. > > That bar is just WAY too high. I agree, but I see precious little evidence so far presented that the two-maturity-levels proposal under discussion will solve that problem. If the problem we need to solve is that it's too hard to get an ID published as Proposed Standard, then we should tackle that. The problem in that case does not need tweaking of standards levels and so on, but hard rebukes of WGs (and, frankly, IESG members) who insist on making that publication hard. If the problem is that things linger in the standards track without progressing, then _maybe_ reducing the number of maturity levels helps, because it might solve a public relations problem the IETF has (i.e. if the real problem of lingering is that the IETF has a resulting PR problem). The draft as it stands claims that the reason the bar is so high for PS is because things linger there. That is an incentive to make the resulting RFC as good as possible because it will be the only document ever published. This amounts to a causal argument about how things got to be the way they are. I am a little sceptical that this story is true. (One can tell just as compelling a story in the other direction: once the PS bar was high enough, there was no incentive to revisit an RFC and try to advance it.) But suppose the two-maturity-levels draft's story were right: as the draft stands, it will do absolutely nothing to solve that problem. If things are currently languishing as PS in a three-track system, there is no reason to suppose that removing one (later) level of maturity will do anything about those documents that never advance beyond PS. If documents do not so advance, then the incentives to make publication as PS hard remain exactly the same. We should therefore expect the same result, which is that things linger at PS and WGs and the IESG make it hard to publish that initial, PS-level RFC. In fact, the draft as it stands will actually make that incentive stronger, because it explicitly permits downrefs from STANDARD to PROPOSED STANDARD. I get the reasoning, but one likely effect of this is going to be that there is even more pressure to get the PS documents close to perfect. Even if there are significant problems with a given PS, if there are downrefs to it there will be a lot of pressure to avoid changing it substantively, because of those references, which means that revisiting PS RFCs won't pay off. Because of the above, I don't think the proposal is a good idea in principle. As a matter of fact, however, I don't think its adoption would make much practical difference: the RFCs that manage to clear the initial high bar will mostly continue to stick at PS for want of energy to move them along the track. Sometimes, some people will have the energy to move things along, and then they will. Best regards, Andrew -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxx Shinkuro, Inc. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf