consensus item - "IDNA2008"

[Paul Hoffman]

At 12:41 PM -0500 12/21/08, John C Klensin wrote:
>Paul, with the understanding that I can live with it either way
>--and that the suggestion was an attempt to see if we could
>focus on getting the more substantive issues resolved before
>spending too much more time on editorial details-- I'd like to
>understand your reasoning.   I think Vint's suggestion (perhaps
>modulo the comment in my note) is reasonable.  Do you see a need
>to have a last-minute debate on this if we can reach agreement?
>If so, why?

Because a number of people expressed a preference for something other than IDNA2008, and because I fully agree with you that we should focus on the more substantiative issues first.

>If we cannot quickly reach agreement, I still prefer "wait until
>we are nearly finished".  But I don't see a problem with asking
>the question.

Fine. So, now we will have the discussion that you didn't want to have.

I disagree with calling it IDNA2008 because it was not completed in 2008. We don't even know if it will be complete at all: we have not had a WG last call, much less an IETF last call or an IESG debate. I am far from convinced that the IESG is going to approve of what we are doing, particularly the "allow seriously incompatible changes to the protocol without changing the version string so that old clients will not interoperate". We in this WG have agreed with that direction, but the IETF has not, and the IESG has not.

The reason I don't want to propose "IDNA2009" is that we might end up with "IDNA2010" or, unfortunately, "IDNA2003". I think your suggestion of having this discussion when we know what the protocol will be was a good one.