On Mon, 21 Jan 2013, Melinda Shore wrote: > > And too bad we can't have the IESG implement it while > > reviewing it. > > There we go. That would cut down on the "I'll support your > awful idea if you support my awful idea" horse trading. No, it just means that I have to implement my awful idea and you have to implement yours and then we agree to cross license the source. The thing that is easy to forget when viewing a specification outside of the context of when it was written is that many/most IETF specs are written to imporve the interoperability of existing implementations. Part of improving the interoperability is to incorporate features and/or extensibility to avoid future hacking. AND we tend to need to grandfather existing features which we then have to work-around for ever. And our most popular specifications are the hardest to improve because of the weight of existing usage.