On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 01:20:23PM -0700, SM wrote:
It would be difficult to get buy-in if the document is not published as a
RFC.
Supppse we actually have the following problems:
1. People think that it's too hard to get to PS. (Never mind the
competing anecdotes. Let's just suppose this is true.)
2. People think that PS actually ought to mean "Proposed" and not
"Permanent". (i.e. people want a sort of immature-ish level for
standards so that it's possible to build and deploy something
interoperable without first proving that it will never need to
change.)
3. We want things to move along and be Internet STANDARDs.
4. Most of the world thinks "RFC" == "Internet Standard".
If all of those things are right and we're actually trying to solve
them all, then it seems to me that the answer is indeed to move to _n_
maturity levels of RFC, where _n_ < 3 (I propose 1), but that we
introduce some new document series (call them TRFC, for "Tentative
Request For Comment", or whatever) that is the first step. Then we
get past the thing that people are optimizing for ("everything stays
as Proposed Standard once it gets published") by simply eliminating
that issue permanently.
Ah, you say, but now things will stick at TRFC. Maybe. But we could
on purpose make it easier to get TRFC than it is now to get PS (say,
by adopting John's limited DISCUSS community for TRFC, or one of the
other things discussed in this thread). Also, the argument about
everyone thinking that RFCs are "standard", and the resulting pressure
to make them perfect and permanent, would be explicitly relieved (at
least for a while), because nobody thinks that TRFCs are standards.
Note that this is not to denigrate SM's suggestion, which also doesn't
seem wrong to me. But since one of the issues appears to be that
anything called "RFC" is set in stone, then if we just stop calling
the early-publication documents "RFC" that and introduce something
after I-D (which is formally only on the _way_ to some consensus, and
not actually the product of it), the blockage might be removed.
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(_at_)shinkuro(_dot_)com
Shinkuro, Inc.
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