On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 03:48:59PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
More important, I question what effect you think it would have.
Anything said in any RFC, regardless of status, can be
overridden by a replacement RFC if the latter gets consensus.
Any statement of the IAB's or IESG's or IETF's opinion is temporary and
thus symbolic, with the only enduring things here being deployed
Internet protocols and the text of the RFCs. Therefore this effort is
symbolic, yes.
But symbols matter. This whole exercise started with someone wanting
the IETF to work on interception capabilities for ISPs who are required
to implement them. And we said no. Just now, days ago. And it was
easier to reconfirm a previous opinion that that been debated years ago
and written into an RFC than it would have been to debate it de novo --
the weight of the past debate, consensus, and publication status helped.
RFC1984 was symbolic then and helped us now. That's proof that symbolic
acts have at least somewhat more than social signaling value, which in
turn is motivation enough for restating the RFC1984 opinion: so it may
help again in the future.
I do think that RFC1984's content doesn't make for much of a BCP by
itself, but paired with RFC2804 [as proposed by Michael R.] it does --
enough to quiet my misgivings about having BCPs whose content isn't
typically BCPish.
Nico
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