OPEN ISSUE: Standards Track

[Keith Moore]

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

the way Proposed is treated by industry now, anything that would cause
problems in wide deployment should make a protocol unsuitable for
Proposed.

certainly failure to interoperate would be in this list,
but so would failure to scale, lack of robustness, failure to provide
adequate security, and a lot of other problems.


> 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?

basically anything that would break compatibility should cause a reset.
new features must be considered suspect, because they haven't been
subjected to the same level of deployment and/or interop testing as
the old ones.  a new way of providing an old feature might be okay,
if the new way were based on experience with the old feature and we
had high confidence that the new way would work based on that
experience.  but I've seen multiple attempts to solve a problem fail.

Keith