On 3 May 2017, at 11:42, Christian Huitema wrote:
My problem is that it is easy to get consensus on some practices, such
as "gathering statistics for traffic engineering", and much less so on
other practices, such as "opening the HTTP headers and adding
supercookies."
I have no idea what "getting consensus on some practices" means. It is
certainly easy to get IETF consensus that both practices *exist*. They
do; of that there is no question. If the IETF were being asked to come
to consensus that both practices *were good*, yes, that would be
difficult. Luckily, that's not what's being asked.
The current document does not differentiate at all. It it
was published as is, the naive reader could just deduce that "the IETF
endorses adding supercookies to HTTP headers" -- to take just one
example.
I cannot come up with any way to read the mention of super cookies in
section 8 as an endorsement at all.
If you're referring to the discussion of header insertion in 2.6.5, the
only thing that could be vaguely construed as endorsing would be the
phrase in inverted commas (which I take to be indicating irony)
'header-enrichment'. If the suggestion is that the irony will be missed
and someone might read that as endorsing, then saying "so-called
'header-enrichment'" might make it crystal clear.
Either way, lack of overt disapproval is not endorsement.
This argument is not an argument about consensus. The intent of the
document (AFAICT) is to catalog the practices, not to register
endorsement or disapproval of them. If the text of the document fails to
do the former, or mistakenly does do the latter, then that should be
fixed. But arguing lack of consensus is just a red herring.
pr