--On Thursday, 22 December, 2005 14:09 -0800 Dave Crocker
<dhc2(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:
I
think it has also been claimed that it is sufficiently
finished and mature that IETF ratification and endorsement is
needed, but no real changes are required or desirable.
John,
1. That is not what has been claimed or sought for DKIM.
Ever. There is a world of difference between protecting
existing implementations and seeking "no real changes".
Dave, I'm sorry, but some of the assertions that have been made
about what "protecting existing implementations" means have been
indistinguishable to me from "no real changes permitted". It
would also be possible to interpret those same statements as "of
course changes are permitted, but some largely undefined design
group, or group of core participants, will decide what is
acceptable and what unacceptably violates the existing
implementations, without regard to WG participant or IETF
consensus".
My impression is that it is exactly that set of assertions, and
the associated implication that some process outside the normal
give and take of WG interactions will be used to determine which
changes are acceptable and which ones are not, are exactly what
has drawn those of us who have no DKIM-specific reservations
into this discussion.
If that interpretation was not what was intended, I would have
expected Tony Hanson's suggestion about reuse of the XMPP
language to be welcomed, not because of pressure from on high,
but because it appeared to be an entirely sensible statement of
what was intended, a statement that was less subject to
misinterpretation than the one in the draft charter.
But you took exception to that change in language. You
apparently saw it as coming in response to an unreasonable,
top-down, demand from a few IESG and IAB members. I saw it as a
helpful and constructive suggestion, coming from a respected
member of the community, to get things unstuck in a way for
which we already had established precedent. You apparently see
all of the objections and reservations that have arisen to the
language of the proposed charter as coming from people who
raised the issues during the earlier, BOF and other pre-charter,
discussions, lost, and are now trying to raise them again.
Without debating whether this is, in fact, an appropriate point
to raise those issues even if they have been raised before
(although I think that "final charter review" is exactly the
right time to raise questions of WG scope and ground rules), I
see people participating in this discussion, precisely because
of the language about existing implementations, who have not
previously been substantively involved with DKIM and who,
instead, represent some small groundswell of community
resistance to a WG that is thus constrained without any clear
understanding of who gets to interpret the rules.
2. This misrepresentation of things has been asserted
repeatedly and has been correctly repeatedly.
From my perspective, the "corrections" have been unpersuasive,
for the reasons outlined above. They got particularly
unpersuasive when resistance appeared to Tony's suggestion of
more moderate language.
3. At this stage, repeating this misrepresentation has taken
on the characteristic of willful distortion.
And those who are on the other side of what I continue to
believe is a series of misunderstandings about a reasonable and
responsible desire to clarify the text and intent could equally
well claim that a desire to stay with the current text no matter
what, and to denounce anyone who wants to try to adjust it, is
evidence that the particular text is, in fact, the result of
nefarious intent. They, however, and to their credit, have made
no such claim.
john
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