Eliot,
Ignoring most of the hyperbole and all of the accusations for
the moment...
--On Friday, 29 September, 2006 08:20 +0200 Eliot Lear
<lear(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
...
Current practice is a ONE STEP process that is NOT documented.
...
That assertion is part of the problem that prompted my earlier
note. It simply is not true. While we don't do periodic
reviews and don't time documents out to historic (see my earlier
suggestion about documenting that as current practice), and, as
Dave Cridland points out, we've got documents at all sort of
practical maturity levels in Proposed, we do, periodically, have
documents advancing to Draft and even to Full Standard.
You may conclude that there aren't enough of those to count and
hence that they can be ignored. I am not sure you would get
consensus about that conclusion. But you cannot deny that they
exist, and exist in fairly recent practice (a quick scan shows
RFC 4502 going to Draft and RFC 4506 going to Standard as
recently as May).
From my point of view --and this is intended to be constructive,
not obstructionist-- hyperbole like the above assertion about
current practice is one of the things that causes fears about
unintended changes. If you had said, e.g., "current practice
is that we use the second and third levels of the process so
little that we need to adjust their descriptions to match", I'd
assume that the resulting document would be structured to deal
with them fairly, to contain a plan about any needed
transitions, etc. But, when you assert that there is really a
one-step process now, I worry that whatever document is produced
will treat the current maturity levels in a fashion that would
have undesirable side-effects and would take multiple rounds of
straightening out.
The solution to this is not for you to say "send text". That is
a reasonable comment if one is, e.g., a document editor
appointed by a WG whose effort has become an IETF community
effort by virtue of chartering, etc. Without that support
structure, your pushing this draft in the way you are doing
seems to me to be a way to force the rest of the community to do
work in order to prevent you from doing damage.
That is unattractive, especially in the presence of an
hypothesis that the community needs a break from major process
work for a while and that, without such a break, the quality of
reviews is not likely to meet the standard we need. I don't
claim that hypothesis has consensus, but it has received some
explicit support and there are several symptoms that could be
interpreted as reinforcing it. Those symptoms could be
interpreted in other ways as well, including that the IETF is
dying before our eyes, but...
john
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