draft-phillips-langtags-08, process, specifications, and extensions

John C Klensin john-ietf at jck.com
Tue Jan 4 03:54:59 CET 2005



--On Monday, 03 January, 2005 17:49 -0800 Christian Huitema
<huitema at windows.microsoft.com> wrote:

> Could you please pursue this rather technical discussion on a
> specialized list, rather than the main IETF list?

Christian,

It seems to me that we are in a bit of a procedural bind on
this.   The spec has been developed, we are told, on the
"ietf-languages" list, but that is a mailing list, not a WG with
a charter.  The document is being processed as an individual
submission, but an individual submission of a BCP that is
intended to replace a BCP that arguably received broader
community review and that is in fairly wide use.  Whatever else
the spec may be, it appears to be controversial, with at least
some folks who are often considered (however wrongly) to have
some idea about what they are talking about being quite
dissatisfied with aspects of it.   We are in (but nearing the
end of) an IETF Last Call.   It is unusual to Last Call an
individual submission document that turns out to be this
controversial, but the nature of the Last Call rules is such
that the IETF list probably is the right place, at least
procedurally, to have the discussion.

>From my point of view, a note to the IESG asking that they
formally abandon the Last Call given the level of controversy
and find a WG (and WG mailing list) to assign the task of
reaching some sort of agreement to would be entirely
appropriate, but that is probably the only procedurally-correct
way to get this off the IETF list while still leaving open the
possibility of a document for which a claim of approval by IETF
consensus could be made.

   john



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