--On Wednesday, November 20, 2013 14:09 -0500 Barry Leiba <barryleiba@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> If someone is willing to write the document and explain why >> ADSP has been moved to Historic, that's good for capturing >> lessons learned. I don't think it's required for the status >> change, but a bonus. > > Do you think that more than this is necessary?: > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/status-change-adsp-rfc5617-to > -historic/ > > I should, in particular, direct that question to John, as he's > the one who brought up the question of documenting why... so I > am adding John to the "To" here. Barry, let me respond to that question as briefly as I can, with the understanding that there are many separate issues involved in this and the second it just the highest-level possible summary of several of those. (1) All other things being equal, the statement is about right. However, if the real intent is to deprecate ADSP and advise people to not use it, the way to do that, IMO, is to publish an appropriate Applicability Statement that says "don't use this" and identify 5617 as updated by that document. If 5617 is moved to "Historic" as part of that process, that is so much the better. By contrast, changing the document status from "Proposed Standard" to "Historic" without documentation other than a statement in the tracker and hoping that people will somehow get the hint (or get curious enough to figure out how to find the explanation in the tracker) doesn't really seem appropriate to me. It also doesn't seem inappropriate enough to justify a big stink and I hope that neither my earlier comment nor this note will be taken as such a stink or even part of one. (2) While I hope I can say this without associating myself with those who are much more critical and feel much more strongly about the subject than I do, DKIM is getting into a very funny status in the IETF. On the one hand, it is being treated as an important standard and building block for other work, perhaps even the proverbial hammer for hitting a large number of alleged nails in and around email and the applications area more generally. On the other, much of the development came from outside the IETF, the WG that did (or ratified) the foundational work was hosted in Security, not Apps, the historical mailing list for the WG isn't on the IETF site, the Chair of that former WG is now moving DKIM work ahead as sponsoring AD, the number of people actually pushing the work seems to be fairly small, those people seem to draw together to reject the opinions of dissenters, and so on. None of that is unreasonable or in violation of any of our procedures, so these comments fall short of an objection. On the other hand, it could be interpreted as having something of a bad odor about it, especially for members of a set of standards that are being proposed as the foundation for additional work, so I would urge that some extraordinary efforts to be sure that every DKIM-related action is open, transparent, and well-documented would be in order. best, john