We have discussed getting a base document out and then
following it up with experimental rfcs. That seems to have
been ignored multiple times. It seems some here think they
can do it all in one document and they want to get it "right"
the first time before we will get a chance to
issue anything. That's a mistake IMHO.
Um, not exactly. It's been made very clear to everyone numerous times that
the goal is to get the base doc out, and have experimental rfc's later.
It's been ignored, but it's also been beaten again into people's heads again
regularly when it has. I think we've done a pretty good job of keeping out
most of the creep, but regardless nobody has been working under the delusion
that we have only one shot at getting everyone's pet projects into one doc
(except the few who quite recently feel we need to start over from scratch).
Perhaps it was a mistake to try the standards document first. I don't think
so. It is the most important (though hardest), so naturally it should
first. Plus, all the other extensions tend to have dependencies on the
first standard. One thing that could have been done differently was to fork
off an usenet-ext group at the very very beginning with a very narrow
charter and focus on several sequential unrelated extensions. However there
was at least one aborted attempt to do that but everyone was so preoccupied
with the main group that it never went anywhere.
--Dave