OPEN ISSUE: Standards Track

[Spencer Dawkins]

We're into specific solutions here, but to return to the drafts...

The process document current says:

>There is also a more fundamental issue with the IETF's engineering
>practices.  Although our current standards track contains three
>levels of maturity (Proposed Standard, Draft Standard and Full
>Standard), we do not have sufficient differentiation regarding the
>quality and completeness of documents required at each stage.  The
>bar is set very high for publication at Proposed Standard, and very
>few documents advance beyond this stage. [OPEN ISSUE: Do we have
>IETF consensus that this is a problem?]

We're hearing proposed solutions to this problem, so it looks like there
are folks who agree that it's a problem.

Are there folks who DON'T agree that this is a problem?

Spencer

----- Original Message -----
From: "Pekka Savola" <pekkas at netcore.fi>
To: "Brian E Carpenter" <brian at hursley.ibm.com>
Cc: <problem-statement at alvestrand.no>
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 4:50 AM
Subject: Re: OPEN ISSUE: Standards Track


> On Thu, 22 May 2003, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> >
> > The answer to this is to recycle at Proposed. The last thing we need to
do
> > is to add a step to the process. It would be entirely recursive in
effect -
> > after a few years, someone would be be asking "shall I implement
> > draft-jonnes-protocol-17.txt, or should I wait for the relatively-stable
> > draft?"
> >
> > We need to remove steps, not add them.
>
> It cuts both ways.
>
> We may either have many smaller steps or only few big ones.
>
> If we add a step which should be easy to get to ("Experimental") and
> actually try to make it so, we might still leave the folks enough
> incentive to finish it and hone it to get it to the next level ("Proposed
> Standard") -- or kill it completely as a bad idea.
>
> I'm not sure whether that's really a good idea, but neither is the
> alternative..