OPEN ISSUE: Standards Track

[John C Klensin]

--On Friday, 16 May, 2003 05:26 -0400 Margaret Wasserman 
<mrw at windriver.com> wrote:

> For example, I think that it should be possible for several
> different proposals that solve the same problem to be
> published in an enduring form by the IETF, and for a
> subsequent process to determine which one(s) will advance on
> the standards-track.  This would solve some of the problems
> that we have in the v6ops WG, for example.  But, we have no
> tools to do this in a way that makes the status of these
> documents visible to our "customers".

Sure we do.   Let's separate two issues.

The first is "our customers" (or, more to the point, marketing 
organizations who will do anything they can get away with to 
promote products -- I'd decided over the years that I'm even 
more upset by equating "posted as an individual I-D" with "under 
IETF consideration and review" than I am about "RFC equals 
standard") distorting the status/maturity level of documents. 
That is a problem, of course, but not one that we can easily 
solve.  In particular, I'm not at all convinced that renaming 
this will help -- I'm convinced that most of these distortions 
are deliberate and not honest errors and misunderstandings.

The second is whether we have the mechanisms you describe above. 
We do: the several documents are published as Experimental and, 
once things shake out, someone proposes that one of them be 
reevaluated for Proposed Standard.   That doesn't respond to the 
desire you have expressed elsewhere to be able to move a 
well-tested and deployed specification directly to Draft. 
Perhaps it is worth thinking about criteria for
   Experimental -> Draft
to supplement
   Proposed -> Draft
but that is a separate issue, I think.

    john