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Re: As Promised, an attempt at 2026bis

2006-10-03 06:25:45
Brian E Carpenter wrote:
Quite seriously - am I to conclude from the absence of comments
on that draft that everyone agrees that it correctly describes
current practice? If so, I'll look for an AD to sponsor it.

You asked.

Your critique itself has its pluses and minuses. 

On the plus side you've at least identified some of the issues that have
made the document a little long in the tooth, like ASes, RFC Editor
text, standard levels, interoperability reports, IPR etc. 

However, you have missed the forest from the trees.  The fundamental
description of how we behave as an organization is lost in a section by
section critique.  It would have been better for you to update RFC 2026
with an appendix explaining the changes and why they are necessary to
reflect reality. 

Oh wait.  I've done (or at least begun) that.

Here are specific comments about your section by section critique:

I think you've misinterpreted section 3.3, which discusses levels of
requirements for standards themselves, not individual components of TS
documents.  But beyond this one has to question the whole notion of
requirement levels such as those in that section.  Why should they be
there at all?  The IETF has no force of authority other than moral, and
people are not going to write code -- or support it -- for the sake of
the IETF's moral authority.  Similarly the discussion regarding
Independent RFCs.  We don't need to critique the words since the IAB &
RFC Editor are working on an update.  Let's go critique THOSE words.

You document the broken rather than fix it.  See, for instance, your
commentary about PS.  You yourself call out confusion regarding STDs
only being assigned at PS.  However, at least RFC2026 is self consistent.

In addition, I would actually affirm some of the general intent that "A
Technical Specification is any description of a protocol, service,
procedure, convention, or format."  I think "implementable and testable"
are laudable goals (;-) but the way we test both is through operational
experience, which is why we had the standards levels in the first
place.  IN PRACTICE, many standards are implemented well before they get
through the IESG process, and so Internet-Drafts are largely serving the
purpose of PS.

Although STD1 is rarely updated it should still be so.  One reason is
that the web is a horrible historical medium for determining what the
status of a standard WAS at in a particular time period.

Eliot

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