Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
Part of the problem may be historical: Requirement documents are a
relatively recent phenomena and likely postdate 2026. I suspect the
original intent of informational documents was to document non-IETF
protocols for the benefit of implementors, as well as record various
other non-standards items such as April 1 poetry or workshop results,
where it is pretty clear that this is the opinion of the author or
some definable group, such as the IAB.
On the other hand, I have yet to see working group-issued requirements
documents being used for anything except shadow boxing (and,
occasionally, recording some early WG thinking), so maybe we shouldn't
take them too seriously.
I have a less jaded view of requirement documents than Henning, but I
suppose I should since I've written a couple. They can certainly function
as Henning says, but for the last one I took on writing, the situation was
pretty dire: endless email threads, people talking past each other, complete
non-clarity on what the end goals -- and challenges -- really were, etc,
etc.
If you add on top of that egos attached to concrete drafts which are often
not at all apparent what problems _they're_ trying to solve, it makes it
nearly impossible to even know what people even disagree on, let alone
agree on.
For that kind of situation, biting the bullet seems like a sensible way
forward.
It's a pretty thankless job in many ways though in those situations: wading
through endless threads trying to make some sense of the cacophony is not
much fun. Yet it did settle things down to a great extent, even if it
was mainly
from sheer exhaustion.
Mike
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