On 7/3/19 4:39 PM, Nico Williams wrote:
On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 04:10:13PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
On 7/3/19 4:04 PM, Warren Kumari wrote:
TL;DR: Being able to mark a specific version of an *Internet Draft* as
“stable” would often be useful. By encoding information in the name
(stable-foo-bar-00) we can do this.
Heather and I will be holding a side meeting at IETF 105 to discuss
the idea and get feedback.
When: Tue, July 23, 3:00pm – 4:30pm
Where: C2 (21st Floor)
It seems to me that this would defeat the entire purpose of Internet-Drafts
and serve to circumvent the IETF process. There should be no expectation
of stability until a document has reached IETF-wide consensus.
Implementors regularly ship pre-RFC code...
Yes, and it's quite often inappropriate for them to do so, a disservice
to their customers and sometimes to the whole Internet.
(there are specific cases when doing so is mostly harmless, especially
if there's a seamless way to upgrade without disruption.... but there
are many cases for which this is not possible.)
But this doesn't have to be about shipping prior to RFC publication. It
can be just about limiting the impact of future edits on existing code
that hopefully has not yet shipped anyways.
Now, this can be done _today_ by convention -- you just write in the I-D
that version starting at version -XX only backwards-compatible changes
will be entertained.
And in general, it's inappropriate for a WG (or author of a
standards-track document) to do that before IETF consensus has been reached.
Keith
