Amanda,
As a former IAB member, I can tell you one likely reason that
the people I mentioned have not relayed their comments to the list.
IAB and IESG members feel that they should not act in a fashion that
might be percieved as interferring with the operation of a WG.
Rather, they feel that the WG should be able to solve its own
problems, especially in a technical vein. This concern about
percieved meddling comes from bad experiences in the past and it is, I
think a reasonable behavoir in the current IETf environment.
Nonetheless, I will followup on your comment and see if I can elicit
more specific criticisms so that the WG can work to resolve them, with me
acting as a buffer.
I have to disagree with your characterization of the history
of PEM-MIME development. Yes, I think it has been at least two years
since the activity on this topic began. It was NOT a topic in which
the WG as a whole focused lost of attention. A small set of
individuals, most notably the authors of the current proposal, were
the primary workers on the topic. Externally, the work often
progressed by the receipt of a revised proposed about 2 weeks prior to
an IETF meeting. At the meeting, a flaw was discovered in the
recently published proposal, and the team went off to work on fixing
that flwa. There was relatively little traffic on the mailing list
about the resolution of the problem, and the process repeated.
It was just before the March IETF that the most recent
iteration of the proposal appeared, and it was noticably different
from the previous verisons. In particular, that version, much of
which is carried over to the current draft, adopted a different
strategy for MIME-PEM integration and it also introduced a number of
new features that are independent of MIME, e.g., our favorite topic of
the key selector. So, it has really been about 9 months that the
current approach has been on the table for review. There was some
initial discussion on the list about these features, and extensive
comments were forwarded to the authors shortly after that meeting.
Responses to the comments, and a revised document, appeared a bit more
tha a week before the last IETF meeting, which did not provide much
time for review and further comment prior to that meeting. It is only
in the aftermath of the meeting that there has been extensive traffic
on the mailing list about this current proposal, and that traffic
indicates several areas of residual concern.
So, it is not really fair to say that the WG (as a whole) has
been struggling to find a solution to the problem of MIME-PEM
integration for a very long time. This particular proposal, with its
mixture of MIME and non-MIME changes to 1421 has been reviewed and
debated for about 9 months. The number of people who have worked on
the MIME integration aspect of the problem has been relatively small
and it clearly has not been a full-time effort. Some IETF WG efforts
have a substantial industry component, i.e., people working on
products based on the specs that will be the work product of the WG.
That probably imparts more energy to the effort and helps speed up the
process becuase contributors are working on something that is
precisely their job. This WG has not had much of that flavor,
throughout most of its history, and that probably contributes to the
relatively slow pace at which some of the work has progressed.
Finally, 1421 ff. are clearly NOT viewed by the authors (and
others) as sufficient for non-MIME environments. If the old RFCs were
viewed as sufficient, then only MIME-specific changes would be
included in this spec. That is not the case, and some of the non-MIME
changes are the source of much of the current disagreement. I just
mentioned this because you closing paragraph stated otherwise and I
wanted to remained focused on what the areas of disagrement are.
Steve