At 23:10 19-06-10, Dave CROCKER wrote:
Thanks for reviving this topic. As the YAM working group has been
finding, trying to elevate even the most well-established and
widely-used protocols to Full standard remains problematic.
It is problematic because there isn't any consensus on what an
Internet Standard is and the requirements to attain that level of maturity.
In Section 2 of draft-housley-two-maturity-levels-00:
"The requirements for Proposed Standard are unchanged; they remain
exactly as specified in RFC 2026."
Quoting Section 4.1.1 of RFC 2026:
"A Proposed Standard specification is generally stable, has resolved
known design choices, is believed to be well-understood, has received
significant community review, and appears to enjoy enough community
interest to be considered valuable. However, further experience
might result in a change or even retraction of the specification
before it advances.
Usually, neither implementation nor operational experience is
required for the designation of a specification as a Proposed
Standard. However, such experience is highly desirable, and will
usually represent a strong argument in favor of a Proposed Standard
designation."
The reader will note that neither implementation nor operational
experience is required. In practice, the IESG does "require
implementation and/or operational experience prior to granting
Proposed Standard status". Implementors do not treat Proposed
Standards as immature specifications.
This proposal removes Draft Standard and Internet Standard and
replaces it with Interoperable Standard. I won't quibble over the
choice of the name yet. In Section 5:
'The requirement for six months between "Proposed Standard" and
"Interoperable Standard" is removed. If an interoperability report
is provided with the initial protocol action request, then the
document can be approved directly at the Interoperable Standard
maturity level without first being approved at the Proposed Standard
maturity level.'
What this proposal advocates is in effect having one level of
maturity, i.e. turning the Proposed Standard into Standard".
"In practice the annual review of Proposed Standard documents after
two years has not taken place. Lack of this review has not revealed
any ill effects on the Internet Standards Process."
There seems to be a confusion between the Internet Standards Process
and the Internet Standards Track. An over-simplified view of the
process is that it is about publishing RFCs. Documents are published
once one can get through the DISCUSSes raised by the IESG and simply
forgotten. As the IESG does not conduct the review of Proposed
Standard documents, the authors are happy and the IETF Community does
not complain as it has either forgotten or doesn't know that there
should have been such a review.
If the IETF only needs a publishing mechanism, it could adopt this
proposal as-is and do away with the IESG. I'll note that the IESG is
supposed to make its final determination known in a timely
fashion. The overall processing time currently is approximately 250 days.
In Section 6:
'The current rule prohibiting "down references" is a major cause
of stagnation in the advancement of documents.'
There isn't any current rule that prohibits "down references". The
reason for discouraging downward references is to have the
specification at the same maturity level.
"Downward reference by annotation" can still be used. That allows
the community to balance the importance of getting a document published.
In Section 7:
"In several situations, a Standard is obsoleted by a Proposed Standard"
A Standard is not obsoleted by a Proposed Standard. A RFC with a
status of Internet Standard can be obsoleted by a RFC at Proposed Standard.
In Section 8:
"On the day these changes are published as a BCP, all existing Draft
Standard and Standard documents automatically get reclassified as
Interoperable Standard documents"
One of the benefits of doing this is that the IP Version 6 Addressing
Architecture can be recognized as a "Standard" for whatever
definition of standard this community finds suitable.
In the Acknowledgements Section:
"In May 2010, the IESG discussed the topic at length and came to the
conclusion that the current situation was becoming more and more
difficult."
The current situation would certainly become more and more difficult
if a particular charter is invoked.
This document has RFC 2606 as an Informative Reference. That should
at the very least be a Normative Reference.
Regards,
-sm
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