OPEN ISSUE: Standards Track

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

mumble....

there's another issue here, but I don't know if it is possible to untangle 
it......

*what sort of bugs, if detected, would make a protocol unsuitable for 
Proposed Standard?*

If there are 2 reasonable interpretations of a statement, which could lead 
to 2 noninteroperable interpretations? (Happened with BGP, I believe..... 
common practice now is only one, and there is a new spec being written that 
clarifies the point)

If there is part of the overall function that is not specified, so that you 
can implement it, but it can do nothing useful without further 
specification? (my favourite example is TIP, if anyone remembers that)

If there are issues that you know will arise when people try it, for 
instance "what is an alphabetic character"? (one of the recent specs out of 
PKIX)

It's fairly obvious that we invented the 3-step process so that we could 
fix bugs. And that implies that we think there are bugs that will only be 
flushed out after people try it out in practice.

But - does that mean that we should let known bugs pass into Proposed?
Or will this be forever a judgment call?

.....

A related issue is whether or not the restrictions on going to Draft from 
Proposed are really appropriate; currently, we say that *only* deletion of 
features is appropriate, and that any change or extension, no matter how 
worthwhile the purpose or how sure we are that it makes no problems, 
requires another round through Proposed. Is this really best for the 
Internet?

                     Harald