draft-housley-two-maturity-levels-06

On balance, whilst I appreciate the aims of this document, I think  
the proposals are not suitable for adoption.
1) This document radically lowers the quality of Proposed Standards.  
Given that to the wider world, an RFC is an RFC, I think this  
represents a mistake. Instead, in common with how one actually  
specifies the standards we write, we should base any modification  
first and foremost on what is observed in practise.
2) I note that it now takes a simple two week last call to go from a  
lowered-quality PS to a full IS.
This is interesting, and I think it's worthwhile examining how this  
might have been applied in recent actions.
Consider RFC 3920 - recently updates, this has been in force for over  
6 years until its recent replacement.
For 5 and a half of those, it could have been an Internet Standard,  
under these rules - XMPP has very wide deployment with a number of  
independent implementations working interoperably.
But it's worse than that - because RFC 3920 generated no small amount  
of noise in its Last Call, including a rework, if memory serves, of  
its SASL profile. Under the proposed rules for PS, this scrutiny may  
well not have happened, and we might either have had interoperability  
problems, or - more likely - simply a worse standard.
Neither of the two note above seem beneficial to increasing the  
quality of the standards we produce - quite the opposite. Neither of  
the above two seem to reflect the reality of what we do and how it's  
perceived by the wider internet community, and nor do they appear to  
take this into account in any way. Together, they represent a real  
danger that radically lower-quality specifications may get stamped  
with significantly higher approval.
I do, however, find merit in Keith Moore's suggestion of a  
lightweight labelling process for I-Ds; this I can see would have  
been highly beneficial in a number of cases, and largely acts as a  
formalization and communication of the status quo; that is, we often  
*do* recommend that people track a draft closely.
I am, incidentally, largely in favour of the central tenet of  
reducing the standards-track to just PS and IS; I think the  
implementation outlined in this proposal is, however, broken.
Dave.
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Dave Cridland - mailto:dave(_at_)cridland(_dot_)net - 
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