SM: > s much as I would like to use the IESG as a scapegoat, the reality is that IETF working groups also work briskly to on impediments. Section 4 mentions that "the rules that prohibit references to documents at lower maturity levels are a major cause of stagnation in the advancement of documents". I beg to disagree. Quoting RFC 4897: > > "With appropriate community review, the IESG may establish procedures > for when normative downward references should delay a document and > when downward references should be noted." > > There is an IESG statement [1] about that. I'll highlight the following sentence: > > "Normative references specify documents that must be read to > understand or implement the technology in the new RFC, or > whose technology must be present for the technology in the > new RFC to work." > > Quoting RFC 2026: > > "Standards track specifications normally must not depend on > other standards track specifications which are at a lower maturity > level or on non standards track specifications other than referenced > specifications from other standards bodies." > > Let's take a document moving to Draft Standard as an example. When we talk about "down-ref", it is the maturity that is the issue. What it means, in my opinion, is that the referenced (normative) Proposed Standard can be changed in ways which affect the stability of the "Draft Standard" document. An implementation that is compliant with the Draft Standard may end up being incompliant overnight as the group that worked on the referenced Proposed Standard found some good reason for adding some requirements. Having down-refs on the "No Fly" list can be an impediment. By explicitly calling out the down-ref during a Last Call, the IETF offers a means to evaluate whether the document can live with the down-ref. > > I commented a week ago on the down-refs in RFC 5953 which is being advanced to Draft Standard. One of the down-refs could be fixed easily. Another one could be addressed with some rewording. Sometimes, such a change is not possible. In a distant future, the IETF community might come to terms with the notion that down-refs are not evil. My person experience with advancing documents is that downrefs are a significant hindrance. As you point out, procedures have been adopted to permit downrefs, but they are not sufficient. We often see Last Call repeated just to resolve a downref that was caught very late in the process. These intoduce delay, and they almost never produce a single comment from the community. Russ _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf