I think this clears the way for Unified SPF...
On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 09:31:26AM -0700, Ted Hardie wrote:
|
| After an assessment of the current state of the MARID working group,
| its charter, and its milestones, the working group chairs and Area
| Advisor have concluded that the MARID working group should be
| terminated.
|
| The group was originally chartered with a very tight time frame, with
| the expectation that a focused group of engineers would be able to
| produce in relatively short order a standard in the area of
| DNS-stored policies related to and accessible by MTAs. The group has
| had no lack of energy. From the outset, however, the working group
| participants have had fundamental disagreements on the nature of the
| record to be provided and the mechanism by which it would be checked.
| Technical discussion of the merits of these mechanisms has not swayed
| their proponents, and what data is available on existing deployments
| has not made one choice obviously superior. Each represents
| trade-offs, and the working group has not succeeded in establishing
| which trade-offs are the most appropriate for this purpose. These
| assessments have been difficult in part because they have been moved
| out of the realm of pure engineering by the need to evaluate IPR and
| licensing related to at least one proposal in the light of a variety
| of licenses associated with the deployed base of MTAs.
|
| Efforts to reach consensus by compromise and by inclusion have been
| attempted on multiple occasions. Despite early hopes of success
| after each such attempt, post-facto recycling of technical issues
| which these efforts should have closed has shown that the group
| remains divided on very basic issues. The working group chairs and
| Area Advisor are agreed that the working group has no immediate
| prospect of achieving its primary milestone:
|
| Aug 04 Submit working group document on MTA Authorization Record in DNS
| to PS
|
|
| Rather than spin in place, the working group chairs and Area Advisor
| believe that the
| best way forward is experimentation with multiple proposals and a
| subsequent review of deployment experience. The working group chairs
| and Area Advisor intend to ask that the editors of existing working
| group drafts put forward their documents as non-working group
| submissions for Experimental RFC status. Given the importance of the
| world-wide email and DNS systems, it is critical that IETF-sponsored
| experimental proposals likely to see broad deployment contain no
| mechanisms that would have deleterious effects on the overall system.
| The Area Directors intend, therefore, to request that the
| experimental proposals be reviewed by a focused technology
| directorate. This review group has not yet been formed but, as with
| all directorates, its membership will be publicly listed at
| http://www.ietf.org/u/ietfchair/directorates.html once it has been
| constituted.
|
| Concluding a group without it having achieved its goals is never a
| pleasant prospect, and it is always tempting to believe that just a
| small amount of additional time and energy will cause consensus to
| emerge. After careful consideration, however, the working group
| chairs and area advisor have concluded that such energy would be
| better spent on gathering deployment experience.
|
| regards,
| Ted Hardie
| co-Area Director, Applications