Since experimentation resulted in significant Internet deployment of these
specifications, the DKIM working group will make every reasonable attempt
to
keep changes compatible with what is deployed, making incompatible changes
only
when they are necessary for the success of the specifications.
implies the need to be clarify the charter in two ways.
The charter needs to reaffirm that the IETF has change control over
the specifications at this point, so that there is no question over who
gets to decide whether an incompatible change is necessary. The
charter also needs to indicate that the working group will consider the
relationship of this work to other, existing IETF technologies.
I'll go further than that. The text you quoted from the proposed
charter is inappropriate, and needs to be removed entirely.
DKIM as currently envisioned has serious flaws that not only limit its
flexibility but which will do harm to domains that do not fit its
Procrustean model for policy advertisement. The flaws are fixable, and
with the fixes DKIM could be quite useful for discouraging forgeries.
But the flaws aren't fixable without making incompatible changes.
The "only when necessary for success" clause raises the bar for changes
too high. At best it is confusing because different people define
"success" in different ways. There are unfortunately some DKIM
proponents who want IETF to rubber stamp this protocol, despite its
widely acknowledged flaws. If this clause is allowed to stand they
will try to use it as a stick to prevent changes that would make DKIM
much more widely applicable.
The DKIM working group should have complete latitude to change any
feature of the current DKIM protocol. The DKIM protocol is neither
widely deployed enough nor useful enough in its current form to dictate
features of an IETF standard protocol.
_______________________________________________
ietf-dkim mailing list
http://dkim.org