I think this is a very good way forward. It is utterly futile to
expect anyone to sit down and work out what it would take to move HTTP
1.1 forward to Standard. Yet it is obviously a standard and the
current RFC is clearly good enough for most engineers to figure out.
I note that quite a few of the people who have been regular attendees
at IETF in the past have been laid off in the past 12 months. There
are very few companies that are prepared to invest in standards work
these days. Those that do are doing so on a much lesser scale than in
years past. It is really hard to justify participation in
organizations that provide few indicators for performance reviews. And
the issue is not simply what Fred IETFer might say to his manager, it
is what his manager says to his boss.
None of the calls I get from head hunters are looking for someone to
do standards work.
On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 10:40 PM, Tony Hansen <tony(_at_)att(_dot_)com> wrote:
Yup, and most of those proposed standards and draft standards should have
been declared full standards *long* ago.
What we *don't* do well is revising the levels of standards that got
published, became fully interoperable and deployed without needing a rev of
the document. Why is their status still marked 'proposed' or 'draft'? RFC
2026 does NOT require a rev to the document to move forward if there are no
errata.
For those specs that everyone has implemented and deployed, but there are a
number of errata that "everyone agrees" are required for the spec to be
useful, here's an idea for a "revision lite" (the diet version of a
revision): recycle the spec almost totally *as-is*, with a section added
called "Verified Errata". Copy in such errata, attach the interoperability
and deployment reports, and publish.
Tony Hansen
tony(_at_)att(_dot_)com
Eliot Lear wrote:
Not THIS again. Let's look at a few of the standards that are commonly
used today:
HTTP: DS
SNTP: PS
SIP: PS
IPv6 Addressing Architecture: DS
SMTP: DS & Full standard
MPLS-VPNs: PS
BGPv4: DS
MIME: DS
XMPP: PS (although it seems the real work goes on elsewhere)
OSPF: Full standard
RIPv2: full standard
BFD: not to be found
VRRP: DS
Radius: DS
DNS base: full standard
DNS components: varying
SNMPv3: full (but long before anyone actually used it)
And so you will forgive people who seem confused by our quaint notion that
there are flavors of standards. We don't do a good job of describing
maturity with our standards levels. Perhaps we do a good job of using the
standards levels to make a recommendation. How much SNMPv1 and v2 is out
there still? Apparently not many people are listening to that
recommendation.
Does standard matter at all any more? I think so. A good number of the
base protocols that are run on the computer I type this from are actually
IETF standards. Yeah (except for software and device management. We blew,
and continue to blow that one).
So let's get real. John's draft was the right thing to do for NEWTRK.
But do we really have the stomach for it? Last time out we did not.
Eliot
ps: see you all in Orange County, where I'm sure this endless debate will
continue.
On 11/11/09 5:04 PM, Adrian Farrel wrote:
Hi,
From the perspective of the world outside the IETF, this is already the
case. An RFC is an RFC is an RFC...
I don't think this is a truth universally acknowledged.
I have heard the IETF disparaged a number of times on account of "hardly
having any standards". For example, a full Standard is equated by some
people with an ITU-T Recommendation with the implication that a DS and PS
are significantly inferior to a Recommendation.
Whatever we might think of the value of this statement and the motives of
the people who make it, it is clear that the names of the different levels
of RFC are perceived outside the IETF.
Over dinner this evening we wondered whether something as simple as
looking again at the names of the stages in the three phase RFC process
might serve to address both the perceptions and the motivations for
progression.
Cheers,
Adrian
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