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Re: Last Call: <draft-housley-two-maturity-levels-06.txt> (Reducing the Standards Track to Two Maturity Levels) to BCP

2011-05-09 12:58:26
Hi Russ,
At 07:34 09-05-2011, Russ Housley wrote:
My person experience with advancing documents is that downrefs are a significant

Thanks for sharing that.

hindrance. As you point out, procedures have been adopted to permit downrefs, but they are not sufficient. We often see Last Call repeated just to resolve a downref that was caught very late in the process. These intoduce delay, and they almost never produce a single comment from the community.

This is an extract from the output of Id-nits for draft-ietf-yam-rfc1652bis-03:

 "Checking references for intended status: Proposed Standard

     (See RFCs 3967 and 4897 for information about using normative references
     to lower-maturity documents in RFCs)

     No issues found here."

For what it is worth, the draft was intended for publication as an Internet Standard (STD 71). As I see it, the problem here is that "Intended status: Standards Track" is assumed to be "Proposed Standard". As the Document Shepherd runs a draft through Id-nits, he or she will not catch the above issue. It's unlikely that the IETF Secretariat will catch the issue.

If down-refs are a process burden (Last Call has to be repeated) and the community does not see any value in having that "restriction", the IETF could do any with it. I don't think that would be a good idea as it wipes out the notion of maturity levels.

There are a lot of things that do not produce a single comment from the community. They are done for a reason. For example, there was a message about "Draft Secretariat SOW for Community Comment". There has been only one comment on that. There is a cost to adhering to a standard of goodness. Once you do away with that, it is not as easy to get it back.

Regards,
-sm
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