Bob:
I generally support this proposal, but have some questions on Section 2.3,
"Transition to a Standards Track with Two Maturity Levels". I am both an
author of several Draft Standards and have chaired working groups that have
produced them.
Any protocol or service that is currently at the abandoned Draft
Standard maturity level will retain that classification, absent
explicit actions. Two possible actions are available:
(1) A Draft Standard may be reclassified as an Internet Standard as
soon as the criteria in Section 2.2 are satisfied.
What is the process for this? Is the IESG going to review all Draft
Standards. Should authors and/or working groups propose a change of status
as defined in the document? Something else? Most draft standards very
likely meet most of the requirements listed in the document for Internet
Standard.
Section 2.2 is pretty clear I think. A request to reclassification must be
sent to the IESG.
... The request for reclassification is sent to the
IESG along with an explanation of how the criteria have been met.
The criteria are:
(1) There are at least two independent interoperating implementations
with widespread deployment and successful operational experience.
(2) There are no errata against the specification that would cause a
new implementation to fail to interoperate with deployed ones.
(3) There are no unused features in the specification that greatly
increase implementation complexity.
(4) If patented or otherwise controlled technology is required for
implementation, the implementations demonstrate at least two
separate and successful uses of the licensing process.
(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.
I think this is unfair to the people who have done considerable work to get a
document to Draft Standard. I hope that the IESG would only do this after
giving a lot of notice to the authors, appropriate working groups, and the
IETF community to give them the opportunity to request advancement to
Internet Standard.
This was added after the discussion that Draft Standards could linger for a
very long time. Some people said that would not be a problem, and other people
said it would be harmful. I conclude that no one knows, so we should include
the powers necessary to resolve the problems if they emerge. If they do not
emerge, there is no requirement that the IESG do anything.
I think this Section of the document needs to provide additional detail on
how this should work.
I do not think we should add speculation about the potential problems to this
document.
Russ
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