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Re: As Promised, an attempt at 2026bis

2006-09-28 06:40:20
While I agree with that, I suggest that we are in something of a
conundrum.  Right now, 2026 is badly out of date in a number of
areas.  It reflects procedures and modes that we no longer
follow, only a fraction of which are addressed by Eliot's draft.
There is general community understanding and acceptance that we
are operating, not by the letter of 2026, but by the combination
of 2026 and a certain amount of, largely undocumented, oral
tradition (I expect to hear from the usual suspects on that
assertion, but it is the way it is).  To make things worse, we
have some BCPs that effectively amend 2026  but that are not
referenced in Eliot's draft -- I've pointed out some of them to
him, which I assume will be fixed, but may have missed others.

If that's indeed the case, the first order of business needs to be to document
current practice. I see no chance of making forward progress on actual changes
without first having a consensus as to what our current state is.

We've been in this position many times before when we've taken up protocol
specifications that have lain fallow for some period of time. In several of
these cases the exercise of getting agreement on what's actually being used
uncovered basic disagreements about the state of play of things in the world
that would have made forward progress very difficult. I think it is reasonable
to believe that this is even more important when things shift away from the
technical and towards the poltical.

                                Ned

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