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Re: draft-housley-two-maturity-levels

2011-01-24 22:14:36
On 1/24/2011 12:37 PM, Russ Housley wrote:
draft-housley-two-maturity-levels-03 was just posted. ...

Overall I find this spec to be an improvement over the previous version. Here are a few areas where improvements can be made.

====

This phrase in Section 1:

    In addition,
    IETF working groups and IESG members providing much more scrutiny
    than is called for by RFC 2026 [1] prior to publication as Proposed
    Standard.

is not a sentence. Should it be "provide"? Should it be "have been providing"? Something else?

====

The sentence in Section 1

    One desired outcome is to provide an environment where the
    IETF community is able to publish Proposed Standards as soon
    as rough consensus is achieved.

and these sentences in Section 2.1:

    The intention of the two-tier maturity
    ladder is to restore the requirements for Proposed Standard from RFC
    2026. No new requirements are introduced; no existing published
    requirements are relaxed.

together lay out what is required for PS. Disregarding the other arguments over the word "restore", these sentences are otherwise fine and dandy.

But I think there needs to be further guidance provided to the IESG and Working Groups on how they should change their behavior. What is wrong with how the WGs and IESG are currently interpreting the rules of 2026 for PS? What current behaviors differ or have gone beyond what 2026 requires, and hence need to be changed to restore those requirements? Without such guidance, nothing changes.

====

One major section that has been removed from the previous version of this I-D is what to do with documents currently in the Draft Standard status. I know that there was significant disagreement with the "automatic reclassification to Internet Standard" proposed before, with good reason.

I'm going to letter the the rules in section 2.2 as follows. I'm also going to indicate how these sort of map into the old classifications:

    a) technical maturity (DS => FS)
    b) belief in significant benefit to Internet community (DS => FS)
c) significant number of implementations with successful operational experience (DS => FS)
    d) no unresolved errata (PS => DS)
e) no unused features that increases implementation complexity (PS => DS)

Some people have argued that having a significant number of implementations (c) is sufficient to demonstrate both technical maturity (a) and the belief in benefit (b). The (d) and (e) requirements have already been demonstrated by virtue of those RFCs already being at DS status, although additional errata may have been filed against the DS.

So I'm going to suggest that the following be applied to documents that are currently in Draft Standard status:

Any protocol or service that is currently in Draft Standard status, without significant unresolved errata, may be reclassified as an Internet Standard
    as soon as it can be demonstrated to have a significant number of
    implementations with successful operational experience.

This reclassification may be accomplished by filing a request with the IESG, detailing the Implementation and Operational Experience. After review, the IESG will hold an IETF-wide Last Call on the reclassification. If there is consensus for the reclassification, the RFC will be reclassified without being reissued.

Protocols and services that have significant unresolved errata will need to be re-issued to resolve the errata before the above criteria can be applied.

Of course, there is still an open question what it means to have a "significant number", which will remain as subjective as it was before with the 2026 rules.

    Tony Hansen
    tony(_at_)att(_dot_)com
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