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Re: [dispatch] Review of draft-mohali-dispatch-cause-for-service-number-12

2016-12-20 17:03:30
On 20 Dec 2016, at 16:49, Adam Roach wrote:

On 12/15/16 22:28, Ben Campbell wrote:
The gotcha is that RFC 4588 would not be possible as an informational today; it would not have standing to register the "cause" parameter. But at the time it was published, there was a lack of clarity around the "standards action" policy for the SIP URI parameters registry.

I don't think that's true. We're talking about a registry established by RFC 3969, which says:

  "SIP and SIPS URI parameters and values for these parameters MUST be
   documented in a standards-track RFC in order to be registered by
   IANA."

...and...

  "For the purposes of this registry, the parameter for which IANA
registration is requested MUST be defined by a standards-track RFC."

These are not ambiguous statements. We just botched our communication with IANA.

For the record, I did not say the RFC was ambiguous. I said "we had a lack of clarity". I think having one policy listed in IANA and another in the RFC counts. I offer as evidence of said lack of clarity the fact that RAI got things wrong with 4458 (My typo of it as 4588 above upthread couldn't help, either) :-)

But I think we can do the right thing here without going back and fixing all of the issues with our ancestral documents. I mean, sure, maybe we should clean that up too, but I don't see the value in blocking new work on doing so.

In terms of publishing draft-mohali-dispatch-cause-for-service-number, I think there are two reasonable paths forward:

The first would be forming consensus that the two statements I quote from 3969 above -- and the reinforcing statement in 5727 -- were all incorrect, and that we want to explicitly (i.e., in a new document) reverse those statements and update the corresponding registration policy. Then, we publish -mohali- as informational.[1]

The second would be implicitly accepting established consensus around this registry, and consequently changing -mohali- to PS.

I think a potential third option is to consider whether -mohali- really needs to modify the registry. (I'm not saying it doesn't--I'm saying we should think about it.)


Rather than figuring out which of these is easier (clearly, the second is less work), I think the real question here is: do we think we got the registration policy for SIP URI parameters wrong?


Keep in mind that the registry is not the only concern mentioned so far. Both 4458 and -mohali- define protocol. Reviewers have objected to that as well.