On Thu, May 05, 2011 at 09:13:06AM -0700, The IESG wrote: > > The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider > the following document: > - 'Reducing the Standards Track to Two Maturity Levels' > <draft-housley-two-maturity-levels-06.txt> as a BCP > > The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits > final comments on this action. Dear colleagues, I have read the document. I have some comments. Some of these I have said before, but since there's a last call I thought I should state my view for the record. First, I don't oppose publishing the draft as an RFC. Neither do I support it. I am indifferent, because I don't believe it will make a great deal of difference. Second, the document appears to claim in section 2.1 that the removal of three tiers is intened to remove the impediments to publication of RFCs at PS. I think this result would be a good thing, but I see no reason to believe that it will happen. It seems to me to be at least as likely that IESG members will over time regard PS as _de facto_ standards, because the draft requires wide deployment of such RFCs in order to move a protocol to Internet Standard. This could as easily reinforce the current situation as to relieve it. Third, the draft appears to be arguing that advancement is somewhat more likely under the revised definitions. While it would be interesting if this happened, my experience as co-chair of DNSEXT makes me dubious. In that role, I have observed that things don't get moved along the standards track because there is no incentive whatever to do so. Things are widely deployed already as PS. Once they have been widely deployed, there is great resistance to change. So in effect, any advancement is a housekeeping operation in which a document we've all known as "RFC NNNN" comes to be called "RFC MMMM", (and sometimes, minor changes are introduced in the text that turn into great points of contention because of the potential for incompatibility). Nothing about this draft changes that state of affairs; instead, it is reinforced by the requirement of wide deployment. Fourth, the decision to permit downward normative references from IS to PS strikes me as a little strange. It means that in order really to evaluate the maturity of a given RFC, you will need also to evaluate the maturity of all the RFCs it refers to. That said, the draft has the noble qualities that it is clear and to the point. I like the solution to the problem of the obsolete definition DS laid out in section 5. Best regards, Andrew -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxx Shinkuro, Inc. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf