Historic scripts as MAYBE?

[John C Klensin]

--On Tuesday, 29 April, 2008 00:24 +0200 Harald Tveit Alvestrand
<harald at alvestrand.no> wrote:

> Debbie Garside skrev:
>> 
>> I have to say that I agree with Mark.  I think he is very
>> much on the  right track.  I do not think DISALLOWED should
>> be set in stone. 
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> We, in this forum, do not have sufficient knowledge of
>> possible future  use to do so.
>> 
> <curmudgeon hat on>
> 
> as I said in our Mountain View meeting, eliminating MAYBE can
> very easily lead us to discover that we have turned DISALLOWED
> into MAYBE.
> 
> The words you used in Mountain View, Mark, were that it would
> take a "major disaster" before we had to turn a codepoint that
> was DISALLOWED into ALLOWED. On that common understanding, we
> agreed that we could live without the MAYBE categories, and
> just have DISALLOWED, ALLOWED, UNASSIGNED and the context rule
> categories.
> 
> I agree that we need to document when, how and why we will
> allow turning DISALLOWED into ALLOWED, and by what procedure
> we will tell all the users of burned-in-ROM applications that
> there now exist DNS names they can't look up.

Harald, the part of that discussion you left out of your summary
was significant opposition to defining and documenting a
procedure for identifying and dealing with "major disasters"
because, if I recall, they were so unlikely to occur, it would
be hard to get a definition right because we couldn't anticipate
the conditions that would require it, and because having the
procedure might encourage its use.

> I hope we don't need to go there. But I'm not optimistic.

Yeah.

    john