Milestones

['Stephane Bortzmeyer']

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 05:00:38PM -0000,
 Debbie Garside <debbie at ictmarketing.co.uk> wrote 
 a message of 46 lines which said:

> But it would be unwise and wasteful, shall we say, and more than a
> little time consuming, to develop documents afresh when a
> considerable amount of expert knowledge, time and effort has already
> been expended.

I strongly disagree. We must not only consider the amount and quality
of work done (both important in this case, specially given the
complicated issues) but also wether it is based on sensible
requirments and goes in the right direction. Otherwise, any proposal
based on hard work could be "rubber-stamped" by IETF, even if it is a
bad proposal, just by claiming "it was a lot of work".

Historically, in computer networks, a lot of "expert knowledge, time
and effort" have been spent on bad protocols and software... Just
imagine the OSI people asking to choose CLNP because they spent time
on it... Or, for a more recent example, the Telco people asking for
the IETF to blindly approve IMS because it incorporates a lot of
effort...