Killing old/slow groups - transition thinking

[James Kempf]

John, Scott,

In my experience, once a draft gets working group status, it is treated by
working group members as being preordained to become PS (if it is on Standards
Track). People start implementing it, moving their implementations forward, and
doing interoperability testing. It is very hard to remove a draft once it has
working group status (believe me, I've tried).

So, as a practical matter, working group status of a draft has come to more or
less represent what PS once was, and PS has become more or less what DS was. As
I believe Scott observed, most standards rarely reach DS. So, in effect, DS has
become fairly useless as far as the practical implications of how vendors and
operators treat IETF standards.

Perhaps it might be simplier to recognize this fact and work with that by, for
example, dropping DS and requiring two interoperable implementations for a
standard to go to PS.

            jak

----- Original Message -----
From: "John C Klensin" <john-ietf@jck.com>
To: "Scott Bradner" <sob@harvard.edu>; <mrw@windriver.com>
Cc: <problem-statement@alvestrand.no>
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2002 6:43 PM
Subject: Re: Killing old/slow groups - transition thinking


> --On Wednesday, 11 December, 2002 21:17 -0500 Scott Bradner
> <sob@harvard.edu> wrote:
>
> > I'm generally in favor of this
> > but when I've made teh argument in the iesg that 'this is only
> > a PS' I do not generally get much support, maybe because of
> > the fact that so few things move up teh process -
> >
> > I do like teh multi-stage process & think it has served the
> > IETF well over teh years buit may need a kick to make it work
>
> As I said in the note to which you responded,
>
> Of course, the key to doing this would be deep
> commitment to it among IESG members and, to some extent,
> by the RFC Editor: any significant nit-picking or
> insistence on document polishing would kill the whole
> idea.
>
> I believe that virtually all of the proposals that have been
> discussed on this list will require the enthusiastic support of
> most or all of the IESG (post-kick if needed).  Without such
> support, I can think of ways that any of them could be subverted
> or sabotaged.
>
> An extended version of an observation from a private exchange
> might also be relevant here: One of my concerns about the PACT
> proposals to increase the role of WGs and areas relative to the
> rest of the IESG and cross-review is that it could cost us some
> of that review, which I've considered critical.  But, if a PS
> document is really treated as a formal proposal, rather than as
> a nearly-finished protocol and document, one might even think of
> a PS document as being a WG or Area standard/document.  There
> might be all of the usual Last Call opportunities for input, and
> provision for escalation if the Last Call exposed really serious
> problems.  But we could then try to treat Draft Standard as the
> first level at which there was formal _IETF_ review and
> approval.
>
> Think, e.g., about a disclaimer on a PS document that said "this
> document was developed in, and approved by, the Foo IETF Working
> Group but no determination has been made as to whether there is
> IETF consensus on quality or completeness".   That might be
> enough to frighten people into waiting for Draft before
> large-scale deployment, as long as the Draft docs actually
> appeared in reasonable time :-)
>
>    john
>
>
>