IETF mission (RE: pausable explanation for the Document Series)

[Ralph Droms]

Regarding "problem statement" versus "proposed
solution" ... I was careful to refer to a
"missing state" rather than a missing maturity
level or process.  The problem is that we need
a way to do prototyping, requiring some
stable-during-the-prototyping document, that
does not then result in deployment of implementations
of a buggy protocol.

- Ralph


At 10:14 AM 6/6/2003 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
>> One of the important states that is missing today is
>> 
>>    stable specification used for prototyping
>
>agree, though you might qualify "stable" to mean
>"during the prototyping period".  it can be extremely
>useful to prototype subsets of a protocol even though
>those subsets are not complete enough to ship.  and
>what's the point of prototyping if not to allow for
>the possibility of changing something?
>
>(but since this is the problem statement working group, isn't
>it enough to say for now that there's a mismatch between our
>document maturity levels and both industry expectation and IETF
>energies?)