Not a problem statement [ was Re: Killing old/slow groups - transition thinking

[Brian E Carpenter]

James Kempf wrote:
> 
> 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).

Nevertheless, the words in the I-D boilerplate mean what they say. People
implement at their own risk.

> 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 don't think that's true. Agreed, a MIB at version -17 may be as close to
stable as a PS, but any knowledge of interoperability for I-Ds is anecdotal.

> 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.

True. If interoperability bugs are found in a PS, it will get recycled 
as PS first.

> 
> 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.

I want to push back against that idea. It only recurses things, and obscures
the status of I-Ds even more.

Personally, I'd be happier with abolishing the unattainable Standard,
and renaming Draft Standard as Internet Standard. But we've argued all
these twiddles before, and never reached a consensus. 

Possibly that's because we don't know which problem we are trying
to solve; see the name of this mailing list.

   Brian