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Re: "why I quit writing internet standards"

2014-04-15 18:45:03

On 04/15/2014 06:03 PM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
On 16 Apr 2014, at 00:49, Spencer Dawkins 
<spencerdawkins(_dot_)ietf(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:

The idea was that you could declare a specific Internet-Draft "good enough for now", for 
a variety of reasons (which varied from proposal to proposal), and one of the reasons could be 
"we're going to stop working on this draft until we get some implementation experience".
Working groups can do that today.

E.g., httpbis calls out some of their HTTP/2.0 drafts as “implementation 
drafts”.

Giving this qualification a slightly more formal standing (as in a place in the 
datatracker, an easily accessible list of implementation drafts on the web 
site, etc.) might help inform implementers that aren't following the entire WG 
mailing list traffic whether it is time to go ahead implementing.

Exactly.

(Of course, the interesting part will be how to properly manage the expectation 
of stability.)

Indeed. Some proposals included a longer-than-six-months expiration date, and some other proposals established an archival series (the documents weren't called RFCs).

There are various ways to go. We'd just need to pick one.

Spencer