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Re: [Fwd: Last Call: draft-crocker-email-arch (Internet Mail Architecture) to Proposed Standard]

2009-02-26 16:41:49



Alexey Melnikov wrote:
Hannes Tschofenig just pointed out that the LC announcement says Proposed Standard. Should this be Informational or BCP?


Alexey,

This has been discussed and debated a bit, over the last 5 years.

On reviewing the list of RFCs that have the word "architecture" in their title and appear to be detailed description rather than either summaries or abstractions, I see that some are informational and some are standards track. None is BCP.

I always felt pretty strongly that it is important for this document to be standards track, for several reasons.

The motivation for this work was my perception that the community of people involved with email technology had/has become quite large and diverse, but that the community did/does not share a sufficiently common and thorough sense of the (same) architecture. This gets in the way of all sorts of discussions, from technical protocol design up (or down?) through operations or even legal policy.

The solution to this is a standard. That is, a formal statement that there is a broad base of agreement on a certain set of terminology, relationships, conventions, etc.

That's what a standard is. And if the document isn't a standard, then it leaves open the question of community agreement.

So Informational doesn't work.

I think BCP also is not appropriate because this is an architecture specification, not a specification of practices. It is foundational input to component standards, rather than a statement about their current usage.

d/

--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net

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