My current understanding of the issue as a mailing list member is that
the measurement of consensus required to move the particular suite of
technical work from the WG into the standards process has been just
stage-managed. This brings the IETF consensus process into significant
disrepute and shows complete and actual disregard for the mailing list
members and their contributions.
I heartily concur. Many, perhaps most, of the contributors to this list in the
past have not had either the time or the budget to personally attend the IETF
meetings. We have therefore relied on a full and frank exchange of views on a
given subject, and through this process slowly (admittedly) developed a
concensus. In many, many cases, the initial presentations and discussion of
ideas, including mine, were substantially modified and improved through this
process. Errors and ambiguities were uncovered, and a certain amount of
education took place, drawing the uninitiated into the fold.
About a year ago, however, a faction within the PEM community apparently grew
tired of trying to get people to agree with them, and ceased most public
discussion. Instead, a succession of Internet drafts have appeared with
relatively little commentary or explanation, and were presented as more or less
a fait accompli. (The fact that they were distributed using a variation of the
MIME standard that was being discussed and which was incompatible with several
products which support MIME made them even more difficult to read.)
A number of the more significant issues that have been holding back the
widescale deployment of PEM are still not resolved, the support infrastructure
is still lacking and perhaps not even understood, and we seem to be
retrogressing. Two years ago, I thought we were about one year away from
effective, commercial grade implementations of encryption and digital
signatures. Now I think that we are two or more years away from our goal, and
things are getting worse, not better.
"Voting is a bad idea in the IETF. Bad voting practices are even worse."
Amen.
Bob
Robert R. Jueneman
GTE Laboratories
40 Sylvan Road
Waltham, MA 02254
617/466-2820
Jueneman(_at_)GTE(_dot_)COM