draft-housley-two-maturity-levels-06

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



On balance, whilst I appreciate the aims of this document, I think the proposals are not suitable for adoption.

1) This document radically lowers the quality of Proposed Standards. Given that to the wider world, an RFC is an RFC, I think this represents a mistake. Instead, in common with how one actually specifies the standards we write, we should base any modification first and foremost on what is observed in practise.

2) I note that it now takes a simple two week last call to go from a lowered-quality PS to a full IS.

This is interesting, and I think it's worthwhile examining how this might have been applied in recent actions.

Consider RFC 3920 - recently updates, this has been in force for over 6 years until its recent replacement.

For 5 and a half of those, it could have been an Internet Standard, under these rules - XMPP has very wide deployment with a number of independent implementations working interoperably.

But it's worse than that - because RFC 3920 generated no small amount of noise in its Last Call, including a rework, if memory serves, of its SASL profile. Under the proposed rules for PS, this scrutiny may well not have happened, and we might either have had interoperability problems, or - more likely - simply a worse standard.

Neither of the two note above seem beneficial to increasing the quality of the standards we produce - quite the opposite. Neither of the above two seem to reflect the reality of what we do and how it's perceived by the wider internet community, and nor do they appear to take this into account in any way. Together, they represent a real danger that radically lower-quality specifications may get stamped with significantly higher approval.

I do, however, find merit in Keith Moore's suggestion of a lightweight labelling process for I-Ds; this I can see would have been highly beneficial in a number of cases, and largely acts as a formalization and communication of the status quo; that is, we often *do* recommend that people track a draft closely.

I am, incidentally, largely in favour of the central tenet of reducing the standards-track to just PS and IS; I think the implementation outlined in this proposal is, however, broken.

Dave.
--
Dave Cridland - mailto:dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx - xmpp:dwd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 - acap://acap.dave.cridland.net/byowner/user/dwd/bookmarks/
 - http://dave.cridland.net/
Infotrope Polymer - ACAP, IMAP, ESMTP, and Lemonade
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf


[Index of Archives]     [IETF Annoucements]     [IETF]     [IP Storage]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux SCTP]     [Linux Newbies]     [Fedora Users]