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Restatement of my proposal from last night's plenary

2002-11-21 09:10:09

Hello folks,

I realzed that my proposal probably wasn't clearly enough stated,
so here goes again.

It is my belief that the IESG has formulated some architectural
principles and applied them at inappropriate times in the process
of standardizing a working group protocol specification.  Right now,
there is nothing preventing such a thing from happening even after
working group Last Call, and nothing that assures that one AD's
architecture principal is shared by the rest of the IESG or the IAB.
This leads to what could be perceived as arbitrary restriction based
on somebody's pet peeve -- whether or not the perception is true.

I think that such architectural principles (e.g., suitability of
vendor-specific extensions, but there are a number of others)
should be formulated by the IAB.

I think the IESG should try to understand early in the process
whether a working group is violating an architectural principle, and
when some candidate proposal seems to be in violation, that the
IESG should get the IAB's opinion in writing.  That opinion should
be subjected to normal IETF process and published as a standards
track document which can be cited as a normative reference.

Again, as I stated last night, nothing is black and white, and I do
not claim that we need IAB statements on every aspect of protocol
design.  But there have been some major upsets lately, and that is
even less appropriate.  There has to be a happier medium.

Regards,
Charlie P.