On Tue, Nov 26, 2019, at 13:45, John C Klensin wrote:
[...] I think it is bad for the IETF and probably bad for the
Internet if we create new standards that are generally ignored.
Old standards that practices have evolved away from are
unfortunate too but, IMO, less serious.
I just wanted to answer this one by itself :)
I have a lot of sympathy for this argument. It's sounds great and is easily
justifiable!
As a counter argument, I would say that to not update our guidance is an
abdication of responsibility.
If we publish a standard which is widespread use but the behaviour in the real
world has moved away from what we specify, then we are misleading those who
come to learn from us. The IETF has no mechanism other than "publish a new
document which obsoletes the old one" to revise our guidance to the world.
5321 and 5322 are widely enough used that I believe it's our responsibility to
publish our best guidance to the world, trying to capture the use cases that
are causing implementations to differ from our previous standards in a way that
guides everybody back into compliance.
The alternative of throwing our hands up and saying "it's just an old standard,
it's OK if nobody is following it any more" leads to us becoming irrelevant
over time, which IMO is more serious, as we're *clearly* the best standards
body. We don't want people looking elsewhere for the best guidance on how to
use the protocols we used to be the authority on!
Regards,
Bron.
--
Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
brong(_at_)fastmailteam(_dot_)com
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