On Aug 1, 2011, Keith Moore wrote: > Perhaps. But it's difficult to escape the impression that this is another example of IETF failing to solve an important problem by focusing on a portion of the problem that's easy to solve, and ruling the difficult part out of scope for the time being. Repeat as needed; you can always partition the remaining part of the problem again. ..... > Does it follow, then, that the Right Thing to do is to avoid building any other parts of the system (even, say, the reputation service query protocol) until the easiest part is finished? No extreme is likely to work, because this is essentially an optimization question for standards processes. We worry too little about the opportunity cost of the passage of time, so we fight time-consuming battles. We should instead be trying to build an optimal pipeline of incremental progress in a generally positive direction, acknowledging inevitable mistakes along the way. I'd like to view the IETF as a standards factory, with a certain optimal level of throughput that we're trying to achieve. As with, say, a sausage factory, you don't just take in a single opinion, chop it up to bits, and deliver a snack-sized bit of RFC before moving on to process the next opinion. The economic benefits of parallelism are so large that they dwarf all but the worst mistakes, so we accept the inevitability of a flawed process that lets a few bugs get through. As a technologist I hate that(*), but it's true. And it means that, if you can look back on a standard you worked on a few years ago and not have any regrets, you spent too much time on it. So while we obviously need to focus on smallish, core chunks of technology like DKIM before devoting a lot of effort to building on top of them, we also need to start the latter before the former are completely finished. If anything, we're late. DKIM is almost a decade old. It's pretty good, and we've long since reached diminishing returns. There's plenty more to do. It's time to move on. -- Nathaniel _____ (*) As a vegetarian I just feel smug. :-) _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf