On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 11:21 AM, Russ Housley <housley(_at_)vigilsec(_dot_)com>
wrote:
I strongly object to this text in Section 5:
2) At any time after two years from the approval of this document as
a BCP, the IESG may choose to reclassify any Draft Standard
document as Proposed Standard.
Section 1 already provides a method for any interested party to request
that a document advance from Draft to Internet Standard. Creating another,
less stringent method to be employed only after 2 years is, at best, odd.
At worst, it seems like a signal that the IESG desires to do a mass update
in the future, but does not wish to deal with the political fall-out of
saying so at the same time as the publication of the document. I draw this
inference from the fact that the current section 2 does not require any
IETF-wide Last Call. If this is meant to say that after 2 years, any IESG
member may put forward a Last Call for any document to be advanced, then I
believe that the IESG member is simply taking the role of community member
set forward in Section 1, and no further section is needed. IESG review,
Last Call, and approval would still go forward according section 1.
In case this is not clear, I do not think a mass update is valuable or
desirable. Many of the critical RFCs are pre-Track and no one much seems to
mind. At most, I think saying that Internet Standards are permitted to
reference Draft Standards is needed. (This can be inferred now from the
fact that Proposed Standards may be referenced, but it wouldn't hurt to
update that in section 4).
I also strongly believe that this proposal will not have the intended
effect without concerted efforts by the IESG and WG Chairs to adhere to the
new "Proposed Standard" vision. As a new WG Chair, I plan to push that
vision for my own group, and I hope that the IESG will support that effort
as this document intends.
I am lost here. Based on a previous version of the Internet-Draft, the
question was raised by Brian Carpenter about documents that were stuck in a
state Draft Standard after that label is abandoned. There was discussion on
the list, and some people felt that it was neither confusing nor harmful,
while others thought that it would lead to confusion. This proposal is
intended to let the IESG decide, If it is not considered a problem, they
can do nothing. If it is considered a problem, they can move the Draft
Standard DOWN to Proposed Standard. Your use of "be advanced" makes me
wonder if you got a different interpretation.
I did misread this, sorry. I still don't think it is a good idea, but I
will drop from "strongly object" to "object".
I think we should acknowledge that we had an era in which Draft Standards
existed and leave it at that. Updates from Draft to Internet Standard make
some sense, because in at least some cases they would have been updated to
Standard. But the only way under our current process to force something
from Draft to Proposed is to re-cycle it, and I don't think that should
change. I think a mass update (in any direction) would be a mistake. At
the core of that belief is a conviction that any change that didn't result
from a re-cycle should require a Last Call to the community. Up, Down,
Sidewise--these should be community decisions that the IESG approves, not
IESG decisions without community input.
Thanks for your quick reply,
Ted
Russ
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