It's all well and good to try to retire Proposed Standard documents that
don't get implemented. But I think it's even more important to make it
easier for documents that do meet the criteria to advance to Draft
Standard. In my experience the hardest part of getting a document
advanced is to collect the implementation report.
Hence this modest proposal:
- For each standards-track document, create a web page that is used to
keep track of bug reports, errata, implementation reports, and test
reports.
(yes, I know about the RFC Editor's errata page - this might be a
modification of that or it might be something else entirely)
- Allow implementors to submit reports via a form on that web page
- An implementation report would name an implementation and specify
what features it implemented
- A test report would, for a given set of implementations, specify
which features were tested and whether they interoperated
- Allow ADs to designate one or more people to review implementation
reports (to eliminate duplicates and cull out bogus reports)
- At adoption time + 2 years, every PS document would be Last Called
for Draft Standard, for a period of 4 weeks. This would serve as:
- a final notice to submit implementation reports to the web site
- a final notice to submit bug reports and errata to the web site
- At the end of the Last Call period the sheperding AD would review
the implementation reports and bug reports and make a recommendation
to IESG (similar to the AD writeup) to either:
- approve document as-is
- submit to author or WG for updates
- recommend that the document be reclassified as historic,
experimental, or informational
Keith
p.s. The hardest part of this (and often, the hardest part of interop
testing) is defining exactly what tests are needed, especially when
features interact or when there are more than two parties participating
in a protocol at the same time. Ideally each PS would specify what
implementation tests were needed to move the specification to DS, and
these would be published along with the specification. But that will
have to wait awhile...