--On Wednesday, November 20, 2013 14:09 -0500 Barry Leiba
<barryleiba(_at_)computer(_dot_)org> wrote:
If someone is willing to write the document and explain why
ADSP has been moved to Historic, that's good for capturing
lessons learned. I don't think it's required for the status
change, but a bonus.
Do you think that more than this is necessary?:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/status-change-adsp-rfc5617-to
-historic/
I should, in particular, direct that question to John, as he's
the one who brought up the question of documenting why... so I
am adding John to the "To" here.
Barry, let me respond to that question as briefly as I can, with
the understanding that there are many separate issues involved
in this and the second it just the highest-level possible
summary of several of those.
(1) All other things being equal, the statement is about right.
However, if the real intent is to deprecate ADSP and advise
people to not use it, the way to do that, IMO, is to publish an
appropriate Applicability Statement that says "don't use this"
and identify 5617 as updated by that document. If 5617 is moved
to "Historic" as part of that process, that is so much the
better. By contrast, changing the document status from
"Proposed Standard" to "Historic" without documentation other
than a statement in the tracker and hoping that people will
somehow get the hint (or get curious enough to figure out how to
find the explanation in the tracker) doesn't really seem
appropriate to me. It also doesn't seem inappropriate enough
to justify a big stink and I hope that neither my earlier
comment nor this note will be taken as such a stink or even part
of one.
(2) While I hope I can say this without associating myself with
those who are much more critical and feel much more strongly
about the subject than I do, DKIM is getting into a very funny
status in the IETF. On the one hand, it is being treated as an
important standard and building block for other work, perhaps
even the proverbial hammer for hitting a large number of alleged
nails in and around email and the applications area more
generally. On the other, much of the development came from
outside the IETF, the WG that did (or ratified) the foundational
work was hosted in Security, not Apps, the historical mailing
list for the WG isn't on the IETF site, the Chair of that former
WG is now moving DKIM work ahead as sponsoring AD, the number of
people actually pushing the work seems to be fairly small, those
people seem to draw together to reject the opinions of
dissenters, and so on. None of that is unreasonable or in
violation of any of our procedures, so these comments fall short
of an objection. On the other hand, it could be interpreted as
having something of a bad odor about it, especially for members
of a set of standards that are being proposed as the foundation
for additional work, so I would urge that some extraordinary
efforts to be sure that every DKIM-related action is open,
transparent, and well-documented would be in order.
best,
john