Re: Last Call: <draft-housley-two-maturity-levels-06.txt> (Reducing the Standards Track to Two Maturity Levels) to BCP

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On Wed Jun  8 05:57:15 2011, Pete Resnick wrote:
On 6/7/11 11:00 PM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
And, more to the point I think, to greatly decrease the quality of RFCs published. Perhaps that's OK, but we need pretty strong consensus that it's the right thing to do, and I haven't seen that consensus in the
Last Call discussion.

All of the above may be true. I personally think that the best thing that could happen in some sense is to "decrease the quality" of Proposed Standard RFCs, but that's certainly a controversial view. And I think it's worthy of an independent discussion. So, at the very least, we either need to agree on this as a topic for this document or remove it.

Just to throw in my tuppence, once more:

I'm entirely in favour of there being a cheaper, rougher, lower-quality grade of specification; I think this should be what Proposed Standard was originally intended to be; I think there is a pressing need for a specification grade to fill this niche within the IETF. In this, I think I'm in agreement with Pete.

I am very much against trying to redefine - and at this stage it is a de jure redefinition, as it were - Proposed Standard *or any other RFC grade* to fill this gap. I think customer expectation of the RFC series is now for a much higher quality than RFC 2026 envisaged, and the net result of regrading PS would be that of lowering the quality of the specifications used in the field. In this, I think I'm in agreement with Peter.

The best proposal I've seen - and I'd note that I can't recall now if this is Keith Moore's or Scott Bradner's, to my shame - is that of marking up specific I-D documents as being a "Stable Snapshot". This proposal seems to have the following benefits:

a) It satisfies the two paragraphs above in a non-conflicting manner. That is, it provides everything that RFC 2026's PS was intended to without being an RFC, with all that that moniker currently implies.

b) It's fairly obvious, in my view, how to start to use the new grade, and how we might adapt to it in a smooth manner. Working Groups, authors, etc would be able to start to use it in a fairly ad-hoc manner, without the kinds of flag day changes to process that two-maturity-levels seems to imply.

So if anyone has the patience for another I-D thrown into the soup, I'm willing to [re]write this one up, assuming the original instigator[s] of the proposal don't wish to.

Dave.
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