If someone is proposing an entirely new protocol, a low bar is appropriate. But that is only a very small fraction of the work done in IETF today. Most of the WG effort goes to incremental refinements to existing specs.
If someone is going to propose an extension to HTTP or PKIX or TLS they had better have a very good document if it is going to go through.
On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 8:39 PM, Martin Rex <mrex@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>
> The bar for PS has crept up, IMHO, precisely because the bar
> for DS/STD has appeared too high to be readily attainable.
Lowering the bar will result in the I-Ds on which the first rush of
implementations are currently being based on becoming the PS document.
But I fail to see how a lowered bar for PS would encourage folks
to tackle DS. Frankly, I believe just the opposite is going to happen.
For many vendors, the working model is switched from "development mode"
to "maintenance mode" as soon as the product is shipped. And when that
switch happens, most of the existing resources are reassigned to new
features, rather than improving stuff that is in maintenance mode.
And when DS/STD are collapsed into one and the requirements for the
new STD are at least as high as for the old DS, then the gap between
the new PS and the new STD will be much larger than between old PS
and old DS, resulting in two problems: more resistence from early
implementors to change the document, and less resources from the
vendors to improve a document describing a product that has already
shipped. The ones who profit most from an improved document would
be those vendors that haven't implemented or shipped yet, and many
of these are not active in the WG or even in the IETF at all.
The reliably predictable outcome of lowering the bar for PS is that
there will be new PS documents with significantly lower quality.
But so far I've not seen any remotely convincing rationale why
the change of PS would improve the likelihood for PS->STD
transitions. Personally, I believe it will have just the
opposite effect, considering that a non-marginal fraction of
us work for large organizations and how these usually operate.
-Martin
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