Re: As Promised, an attempt at 2026bis

On Fri Sep 29 07:20:34 2006, Eliot Lear wrote:
> What it requires is that people who want all their pet changes to go
> into a draft to simply show some discipline and accept that not
> everything will be fixed at once.  Current practice is a ONE STEP
> process that is NOT documented.
I'm not actually sure that our current standardization process *is* 
one step. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it is very far from one step. 
I readily agree that it's not documented, though.
Consider this: RFC3501 is a Proposed Standard. RFC2244 is, however, 
merely a Proposed Standard.
One is considered mature and stable by the community, and is widely 
used. The other is very rarely used, and is a considerably less 
mature specification. Neither, of course, is considered as stable, 
mature, and provenly interoperable as RFC2821, which, befitting its 
status, is at Proposed Standard.
None of this is documented, and a reader might be led to believe that 
they are all, in fact, at the same stage in the standardization 
process. This is a ludicrous idea, of course, and anyone familiar 
with email with correct them rapidly, knowing the actual status of 
these specifications.
What *is* one step is that there is only one step of our formal 
standardization process that usually gets used, in no small part 
because is has effectively been replaced by an entirely different 
standards track which operates by word of mouth.
I firmly believe that we should have documents whose status 
adequately describes the reality of their status, rather than trying 
to simplify the existing status until it happens to fit. Otherwise we 
might as well abandon the document status entirely, since it becomes 
more and more meaningless.
Dave.
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