there's a WG that is doing a standards track update
This is hardly a new situation. Normal procedure would be for
that WG to initiate relevant actions to obsolete the alternative.
I may be missing something, but I fail to see why this needs
an IESG statement.
Regards
Brian
On 2012-04-20 17:24, John Levine wrote:
So, the standard question: what's the problem that needs solving here?
I presume that the issue motivating this is RFCs 4405 through 4408,
which define two experimental mail validation schemes Sender-ID and
SPF that, for reasons that sort of made sense at the time, interpret
the same DNS TXT record in slightly different ways. As it turned out,
SPF has gained wide acceptance, and Sender-ID has disappeared, so
there's a WG that is doing a standards track update of RFC 4408 which
defines SPF. Since aproximately nobody uses Sender-ID, everyone
interprets the DNS TXT record the SPF way, and in practice there's no
ambiguity.
In this particular case, it would be a good idea to report what
happened, and deprecate Sender-ID, probably by making 4405 through
4407 historic. We have a draft that does this, which I think is worth
publishing, but that's different from inventing an entire process to
deal with a one-off situation that may well never occur again.
The SPF RFC also defined a new RR for SPF which was intended to
resolve the ambiguity by moving SPF queries from TXT to the new RR.
Not surprisingly, after six years the new RR remains almost entirely
unused. We're deprecating that, too, which I suppose might be noted
in the IANA registry. But again, this doesn't seem to be a frequent
enough situation to require a policy.
R's,
John
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