Re: Proposed IESG Statement on the Conclusion of Experiments

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At 13:49 20-04-2012, Yoav Nir wrote:
No, I don't believe they are mislabeled, they just don't fit the statement in RFC 2026, and they're not scientific experiments. It gives fair warning to would-be implementers

Using draft-lear-lisp-nerd-09 (Experimental) as an exmaple:

  "Given that there does not appear to be any effort to actually
   implement this specification, does it make sense to publish it as
   Experimental?  It would seem that Informational would be a fine
   way to document this approach.  If I follow some of the arguments
   that Pete and Ron have made recently, I would even support the
   publication of this document as Historical"

BTW, that draft is better written than a (non-working group) draft which is documented as having been reviewed by a working group or material intended as Proposed Standard.

It has been said that the IETF runs on Proposed Standards. It is up to the reader to assess whether authors give proper consideration to the intended status of their draft. From the quoted text, a draft could fit within Experimental, Informational or even Historic. Whether there is a clear view of what each status is supposed to mean is up to the jury to decide. One could read RFC 2606 or something else.

For example, 'moving a document to Historic status means that the document is "not [an] Internet Standards in any sense'. Would Informational or Experimental be considered as Internet Standards in any sense?

There is supposed to be less distributional conflict in the production of Experimental or Informational documents. The main point from the proposed statement [1] seems to be:

   "the work may be abandoned through lack of interest or because
    important lessons have been learned."

If "important lessons" have been learned, it is up to the authors to see whether they would like to share them with the IETF. There are informal ways and means within the IETF to make that happen.

The "lack of interest" sounds like establishing some kind of sunset clause. Putting that in the document does not seem to work out well. It would be easier to leave it to the authors to choose when they want to be hanged and state that in the write-up. The reminders could be automated, similar to what is currently being done for I-Ds. There could be a 99 year upper limit as the person who coded that feature may have restricted the limit to two digits.

The IESG has already expressed its expectations. As for the "Tidy up after" [2], given that this proposed IESG statement is not a change of process, it should be possible to move RFC 2345 to Historic without the publication of an Informational RFC.

A long time ago a little girl asked her parents why all these names were created for RFCs. She was told to read RFC 1310. That is not really be the why.

Regards,
-sm

1. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg72828.html
2. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg72852.html


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