Re: IETF Sub-IP area: request for input

A few more issues for this discussion:

- The statement that some of the WGs in the SubIP area are about to 
finish up may be deceptive. Some of the WGs are accepting new 
proposals on wide-ranging topics. Some of the proposals that are 
within the charters are bogged down in personal/political hassles 
that are only apparent in the hallways, not on the mailing lists. In 
other words, they are similar to many WGs in other areas of the IETF.
- So far, every message has miscounted the number of WGs in the area 
by one. PWE3, even though it is in Transport, is very clearly a SubIP 
WG. I have yet to speak to anyone who could clearly say why PWE3 is 
not part of SubIP (the fact that it "affects" transport is silly: all 
SubIP technologies will affect transport). And it is nowhere near 
finishing.
- There are other WGs that are not in SubIP but have many of the 
characteristics that people in this thread have been talking about. 
There is a real question about why is the IETf working on IPoverFoo 
for any given Foo. The charters for IPCDN and IPOIB and IPORPR 
indicate that they are covering layer 2 technologies carrying IP. If 
IPO is part of SubIP, these should be as well.
- The "wait for some of the WGs to wind down before acting" 
suggestions are based on the theory that the WGs will wind down. It 
is odd to hear that from people with lots of IETF experience.

The SubIP area experiment should be terminated because it didn't 
reach any appreciable results in the allotted time. Further, the IESG 
should decide for all of the WGs currently in what is really SubIP 
(that is: ccamp, gsmp, ipcdn, ipo, ipoib, iporpr, mpls, ppvpn, pwe3, 
tewg), which area is actually appropriate for each WG. It's likely 
that the answer will be "well, it doesn't really fit anywhere 
sensibly in the current IETF area structure".
That's a pretty significant answer. Fortunately, there is a solution, 
which is to disband the WGs and let the industry trade associations 
that are dealing with the topics take over the work. The MPLS Forum 
is an obvious place for the MPLS-related work. ipo could go to the 
Optical Internetworking Forum, iorpr can go to the Resilient Packet 
Ring Alliance, and so on. These are organizations that have funded 
secretariats, existing technical committees, and so on.
Keeping these WGs in the IETF has a real cost, namely on the time of 
the IESG and the IETF Secretariat. It is probably better to let 
groups whose primary focus is the named technology do the work.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium